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THE AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 



-#♦ 



THE AUTHORITY 



OF 



CRITICISM 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 



BY 

WILLIAM P. TRENT 

AUTHOR OF 
WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS," "jOHN MILTON," ETC, 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1899 



r- , 



# 















4137S 

Copyright, 1899, 
By Charles Scribner's Sons. 



2- 188fl 



John Wilson ajjo Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 

•ecowD 00*»Y. 






TO 

S. S. p. PATTESON, Esq. 

Of the Richmond {V a.) Bar, 
AS A TOKEN OF FRIENDSHIP. 



PREFATORY NOTE 

Although the papers contained in this vol- 
ume were written from time to time and for 
special purposes, they will, I trust, be found 
to possess in the main a unity sufficient to 
warrant the reader in regarding them as 
something more than a mere collection of 
detached essays. I am not presumptuous 
enough to claim that in them I have outlined 
a critical philosophy, and given certain appli- 
cations of it; but I think I may fairly say 
that I have endeavored to discuss some im- 
portant critical and literary problems which 
must be satisfactorily dealt with before an ade- 
quate critical philosophy can be developed. 

I suppose that few people will be rash 
enough to assert that such a philosophy ex- 
ists already, and I hope that many will agree 
that unless it is developed in the future 
critics are likely to continue their uncom- 
fortable and undignified floundering in the 
vii 



PREFATORY NOTE 

bogs of dogmatism and impressionism. Act- 
ing on these suppositions, I have ventured to 
investigate as well as I could such important 
topics — fundamental as they plainly are to 
a critical philosophy — as The Sanction and 
Scope of the Authority of Criticism; The 
Nature of Literature, with particular regard 
to its emotional basis ; The Relations of Lit- 
erature to Morals ; and The Best Methods of 
Teaching Literature in the Schools. 

To these mainly theoretical but in part 
practical papers I have added a few others, 
not merely to lend variety to the volume, 
but more particularly to illustrate in a 
somewhat concrete way the truth of princi- 
ples contended for in the group of essays 
just specified. For example, the papers on 
Tennyson and Musset and on the Byron 
Revival will be found to bear upon the im- 
portant topic of the emotional basis of litera- 
ture. They were written, however, with no 
intention to prove a thesis, but simply as 
critical studies. 

In conclusion, I must assure my reader 

that I arrogate to myself no discoveries, and 

that I am aware that I am probably as far 

from having an adequate critical philosophy 

vdii 



PREFATORY NOTE 

as he is. All I can positively affirm is that 
there is need of such a philosophy, and 
that honest groping for one on the part of 
men who have a high appreciation of the 
critic's function is perhaps the best means 
of attaining it. 

W. P. TRENT. 

The University of the South, 

Sewanee, Tenn., June 7, 1899. 



*»* Thanks are hereby returned to the editors of 
Tlie Forum, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Bookman, for 
permission to reprint the first and sixth, the seventh, and 
the ninth essays respectively. 

G. 



IX 



CONTENTS 

Page 

The Authority of Criticise! i 

Apropos of Shelley 35 

Literature and Morals 97 

The Nature of Literaturj: 141 

On Translating Horace 187 

The Byron Revival 203 

Teaching the Spirit of Literature . . 237 

Mr. Howells and Romanticism . . . . 257 

Tennyson and Musset once more . . . 269 



THE AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 



I 

THE AUTHORITY OF 
CRITICISM 



I 



The comparatively recent visit of M. Ferdi- 
nand Brunetiere to this country has sdmu- 
lated among us fresh interest in a question 
that is almost as old as the hills, and as 
varied in the forms it assumes ; to wit, What 
is the weight of authority carried by criti- 
cism? Is there such a thing, men are asking 
themselves, as a science of criticism, or is all 
criticism at bottom merely the expression of 
an individual opinion, unsupported, or sup- 
ported in varying degrees, by other individual 
opinions? If it is well-nigh impossible to 
eliminate the personal equation in strictly 
scientific experiments, is it worth while, they 
ask, to try to eliminate it from our studies in 
the semi-sciences, such as ethics and history, 
or in the arts? In other words, is not criti- 
cism a present, individual act; ought not the 
critic to say '* I " instead of" we " ; and is not 
every one of us that reads a book or looks at 
3 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

a picture as much master of his own Hkes and 
disHkes as the typical Englishman is lord of 
his own castle? 

It is plain that this question is almost as 
old as the race ; for it is fundamentally the 
question men have been asking themselves 
since primitive times, since the very first at- 
tempt on the part of some bold innovator to 
break up what the late Mr. Bagehot aptly 
called *'the cake of custom." A conscious, 
or semi-conscious, assertion of the right of in- 
dividual judgment is the basis of every step of 
progress that humanity has made ; and, speak- 
ing loosely, the history of civilization is the 
history of the emancipation of the individual 
will and judgment. The authority of society 
has not indeed been abrogated ; but it retains 
the force of law over our actions only, and 
principally on utilitarian grounds. " Society 
thinks so ; therefore a thing is right " is a 
dictum that will stand in the way of few lib- 
eral-minded men in this year of grace. 

But, if men have been daring to tell society 
for centuries that it is in error with regard to 
this or that point of ethics or politics, it is 
not surprising that they should long ago 
have mustered up courage to tell the small 
cultivated portion of society not only that it 
is in error with regard to particular books 
4 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

and objects of art, but that it is in error in 
thinking that it has any special call or right 
to pronounce judgment in such matters. 
This is precisely what Perrault did in his 
famous controversy with Boileau over the 
comparative merits of the ancients and the 
moderns. 

About t^vo centuries have elapsed since 
Perrault finished the third part of his ** Paral- 
lele " ; and the controversy, with a somewhat 
shifted base, is still raging in France, with 
MM. Brunetiere and Lemaitre as protagon- 
ists. It is no longer a question of Homer 
and Virgil versus Chapelain, or even whether 
in translation Pindar is intelligible to the wife 
of a worthy French magistrate; but it is 
pretty largely a question of the importance 
of the seventeenth century, as compared with 
the nineteenth, and of the benefit to the stu- 
dent of classifying properly a work of art, 
compared with the benefit to be derived from 
treating such a work as an object of aes- 
thetic or psychologic interest merely. In 
other words, the chief critical problem which 
the French mind is endeavoring to solve to- 
day is a more complex form of the problem 
with which it was struggling two centuries 
ago, and contains precisely the same elements 
that all great mental problems involve, viz., 
5 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

the value or worthlessness of what the present 
has preserved from the past, and the rights 
of the individual, as opposed to the claims of 
society. 

Yet the controversy between the ancients 
and the moderns was not confined to France ; 
indeed, that country, as M. Brunetiere shows, 
took up the question in a curiously belated 
fashion. And in like manner the present 
controversy between collective and individu- 
alistic, or, if we prefer, academic and im- 
pressionist, criticism, is not confined to the 
partisans of MM. Brunetiere and Lemaitre. 
In England the late Matthew Arnold did 
doughty battle for the cause of ordered 
criticism ; and Professor Saintsbury has for 
years been doing his best to wave the flag 
of the impressionists. In America Lowell's 
influence was, on the whole, conservative; 
while Mr. Hamlin Garland, able and sincere 
writer though he be, and most of the strenu- 
ous admirers of Walt Whitman have borne 
the standard of individualism to a quite im- 
pregnable position — whether on the heights 
of reason or among the fens of folly must be 
determined later. 

But, over and above the labors of individual 
critics, there are two forces at work in all parts 
of the Western world that continue to carry 
6 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

on this conflict, often unconsciously. These 
two forces are the teachers and the reporters. 
Nearly all persons who engage in any form 
of teaching are interested in preserving the 
sway of authority, and may be counted on 
the side of conservative criticism. On the 
other hand, men whose business it is prima- 
rily to amuse and interest, and only seconda- 
rily to instruct, society, are not led to uphold 
the sway of authority (save in matters of re- 
ligion and politics about which their patrons 
may be sensitive) simply because what holds 
by the past is not likely to prove so interest- 
ing as what touches the present or looks to 
the future. 

Reporters, then, — and the term practically 
includes all writers who minister to public 
curiosity, — may be counted, n most cases, on 
the side of individualistic criticism. That is 
to say, the reportorial spirit may be counted ; 
for newspaper critics per se are usually hide- 
bound sticklers for academic methods. As 
the reporter, owing to the waning force of 
traditional checks upon a mixed and rapidly 
evolving society, plays quite a part among 
us, and is likely to gain power rather than 
lose it in the near future, it follows that im- 
pressionist criticism will not lose ground 
in America for some time to come, even if it 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

does not grow rampant. On the other hand, 
as our teachers and journaHstic critics are 
rarely possessed of broad culture, the real 
force and value of the academic principles 
they stand for tend to become enfeebled and 
obscured. Hence, it is not so much a battle, 
of the critics that we are likely to observe in 
America, as a melee. 

If all this be true, it would seem to be worth 
our while to endeavor to determine where the 
truth hes with regard to this vexed problem 
of the authority of criticism. If M. Brune- 
tiere is right, and M. Lemaitre wrong, it will 
be well to try to check our present propulsion 
toward impressionism. If M. Brunetiere is 
wrong, — I use his name only because he is 
plainly the foremost living representative of 
academic criticism, — then we may feel easy 
about the go-as-you-please methods of some 
of our critics, and may give ourselves up to 
quite a hedonistic cult of frank individualism. 
If, however, both of these distinguished men 
are right in part, and both are wrong in part, 
it is obvious that it all the more behooves us 
to seek to establish the proper limits of the 
principles of criticism each strives to apply ; 
for the more complex our principles of 
thought and action, the more chance there is 
of our going dangerously astray in their 






AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

application. It is hardly necessary to add 
that a presumption lies in favor of the last 
hypothesis, not only because extremes are 
rarely safe, but because two great critics, or 
two numerous factions of critics, are not 
likely to be enthusiastic supporters of oppos- 
ing principles without having positive reasons 
of weight to actuate and sustain them in their 
contentions. 

II 

Our first question is, then, w^hether M. Brune- 
tiere is right when he asks us to distrust our 
individual judgment about a piece of litera- 
ture, and to make a study of criticism and 
literary history in order to discover the 
proper value and rank of the work to be 
judged, before we venture to form or express 
a settled opinion concerning it. This is 
practically what he does ask, although he 
lays most stress on a particular demand ; to 
wit, that we shall pay special attention to the 
matter of genres — that is, to the different 
forms or categories of literature. It is also 
w^hat Matthew Arnold asked, although he laid 
most stress on the matter of general culture. 
But M. Lemaitre demurs at once. He says, 
in substance : You are leaving out of sight 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

the main object for which men write and 
read books, viz., to receive pleasure and, 
partly, to give it. Your abstract genres, 
your epics and dramas, creatures of your own 
brains, become your tyrants and doom you 
to hopeless drudgery. It is no longer pos- 
sible for you to take up a book and simply 
enjoy it. I, too, could do your kind of 
criticism if I had a mind to ; but if I did, I 
should be turned into a solemn magistrate, 
thinking forever of the black cap I must soon 
put on. — Now this demurrer has plainly its 
basis in common sense, and is a wholesome 
corrective of the claims of the academic 
critic when these take an extreme form. It 
is obvious that certain minds will always 
rebel at a hard and fast code of rules for 
critical reading, and that most minds will rebel 
sometimes. Not only are there books that we 
want to read without analysis, but there are 
times when we prefer simply to read a book 
that at other times we should be glad to an- 
alyze. We do not care to analyze The Pris- 
oner of Zenda : it would scarcely pay us to 
analyze it, although one enterprising student 
of architecture has drawn an elaborate plan 
of the remarkable castle. Yet we were all 
eager to read it ; and we are most of us glad 
now that we did read it. On the other hand, 
lo 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

we ought at one time or another to make a 
careful analytic study of Shakspere's Sonnets; 
yet there are some of us who like to have a 
pocket edition of these divine poems with us 
on a railway journey, when careful study is 
plainly out of the question. 

Again, we are constantly repeating to 
young people the injunction that they should 
begin to read classical poems and novels as 
soon as they are able to comprehend them; 
but we do not say at the same time that they 
must wait until they understand the main 
facts about the *' evolution of genres" before 
they form an opinion of the general value and 
interest to themselves of the literature with 
which they have been brought in contact. 
In this case, however, we do apply a part at 
least, of M. Brunetiere's critical philosophy; 
for we rely chiefly on the verdicts of past 
generations in our choice of the classics we 
recommend to the young. Still, it remains 
true that the most critically minded of us can- 
not be critical always, and that large classes 
of readers can never be critical in any true 
sense of the word. So M. Brunetiere's prin- 
ciples hold good for only a small body of 
readers, and not at all times and seasons even 
for these. It is idle, however, to think that 
he has ever meant them to be taken strictly 
1 1 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

by the majority, by what we call politely the 
reading public ; yet there is a sense in which 
they may be laid to heart by every one, and 
inculcated even in a very young child. 



Ill 



Reduced to their lowest terms, the princi- 
ples for which most academic critics stand 
are, I think, three in number: (i) That due 
weight should be given to the collective 
wisdom of the past and the trained knowl- 
edge of the present ; (2) that there are more 
or less ascertainable degrees of value in the 
various genres of artistic production; and 
(3) that no art can be absolutely divorced 
from ethics. 

It follows at once from the assumption of 
these three principles that if it can be shown 
that a special kind of poetry, say the epic, is 
of greater value (that is, makes a higher and 
wider appeal to the minds and hearts of men 
in general) than another kind, say the elegy, 
it is not merely a mistake of judgment to 
prefer the latter to the former, but also, 
where sufBcient knowledge is available, — a 
point which is covered by the first principle 
given above, — an ethical lapse of a more or 
12 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

less venial character. In fine, if there were 
such a person as a purely academic critic of 
perfect fearlessness, he would affirm that to 
prefer Gray's Elegy to Paradise Lost is 
not only foolish, but wrong: for this is the 
sense in which he accepts the dictum that 
art cannot be divorced from ethics ; it being 
quite possible for an academic critic to 
acquiesce in the truth of the maxim " Art 
for art's sake," provided it be interpreted 
rationally. In other words the academic 
critic, while he may not judge works of art 
from a preconceived ethical point of view, and 
demand that they serve some definite ethical 
purpose, will, if he be consistent, assert em- 
phatically that, as no judgment can be formed 
without entailing some corresponding respon- 
sibility, and as objects of art must be judged 
before we can determine whether the emotions 
produced by them are really wholesome or 
harmful, it follows that art, by entailing re- 
sponsibilities upon all who are brought into 
contact with it, — and what experience in life 
does not entail upon us the responsibility of 
determining whether it be wholesome or 
harmful? — cannot in the last analysis be 
divorced from ethics. 

If, now, it be urged that what we ought to 
examine and pass judgment upon is not the 
I". 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

object of art that produces emotions in us, 
but ourselves who experience these emotions, 
the critic will reply that he has always main- 
tained the necessity for self-examination in 
cesthetic matters, but that, if a doubt be im- 
plied with regard to the possibihty of obtain- 
ing valid objective judgments in the domain 
of the arts, such doubt must apply as well 
to the ultimate validity of all other objective 
judgments, with the result that we are landed 
either in pure ideahsm or in universal scepti- 
cism. An objection, however, that is so far- 
reaching is practically no objection at all. 

But certainly this strange doctrine, that it 
is in some way wrong to prefer a poem, a 
picture, or a statue of an inferior genre to 
one of a superior genre, will not be admitted 
by many persons without considerable pro- 
test. Yet, if it be once granted that there 
are higher and lower forms of art, and that it 
is the duty of every man, not merely to act 
on the highest level possible, but also to 
expose his soul to the highest influences 
possible, it follows that to prefer wilfully the 
lower to the higher in any particular is, 
strictly speaking, an ethical lapse. Many 
of us are, of course, absolved from all blame 
in this regard on account of our ignorance in 
the premises : those of us who are not igno- 
14 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

rant have generally tried to justify ourselves 
by affirming that, while there may be genres, 
there is no proof that one is higher than 
another ; that it is a mere assumption of a 
priori criticism to say, for example, that a 
fine ode like Gray's Progress of Poesy is 
per se superior to the same poet's Elegy 
Written in a Country Churchyard, — an 
opinion held, perhaps, both by Gray himself 
and by Matthew Arnold. 

The answer made by the academic critic 
to this contention will naturally bring into 
question his first principle, viz., that due 
weight should be given to the collective 
wisdom of the past and to the trained knowl- 
edge of the present. The ode, he will say, 
stands at the head of all forms of lyrical 
poetry, because in it the subjective emotions 
of the poet are fused to a white heat. The 
ancients regarded the ode as the greatest of 
lyrical forms ; and modern students of poetry 
have as yet seen no reason to abandon this 
view. The finest ode of Pindar ought then 
to be superior to any elegy of Mimnermus, 
and Gray's ode should outrank his Elegy, 
unless in the former poem the poet has 
fallen below the level proper to the genre 
selected, and in the latter poem has risen to 
an equal or greater degree, — a phenomenon 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

which seems to have occurred, if the two 
pieces be regarded as wholes, and which 
both explains and justifies the popular verdict 
in the matter. 

This answer shows us at once how inter- 
dependent the three principles of the aca- 
demic critic really are. If there are genres 
of higher and lower value, then it is our duty 
to try to put ourselves in greater sympathy 
with the higher than with the lower; or, in 
other words, we cannot, if we would, divorce 
art from ethics. But we cannot establish 
our contention that there are superior and 
inferior genres, unless we insist that due 
weight be given to that collective wisdom of 
the past which has established and differenti- 
ated the various genres. It is the conscious, _ 
or unconscious, perception of the interde-H 
pendence of these principles of academic 
criticism that has led the impressionists, who 
generally desire to escape from ethical re- 
sponsibility, to attack with relentless vigor 
that deference to the judgment of the past 
inculcated by the first principle. They can- 
not well attack the second part of this prin- 
ciple, that due weight should be given to the 
trained knowledge of the present; for this 
would be to undermine the authority of their 
own privileged order of mandarins: they 
i6 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

can, however, say much about a servile 
dependence on an effete past. 

But, if the collective wisdom of the ages 
be of paramount importance in ethics, philo- 
sophy, law, and all studies in which fresh 
material for experimentation is not being 
continually introduced, it is difficult to see 
how its authority, within reasonable limits, 
can be questioned with regard to criticism. 
That genres exist even in art is a fact as well 
determined as the existence of the various 
mental faculties. That we do not know the 
ultimate nature of art in the one case, or of 
mind in the other, does not prove that we 
have no need of the hypotheses of criticism 
and of metaphysics. That there is a hier- 
archy of genres is a fact as well proved as 
that there is a hierarchy of mental powers 
or of bodily functions.^ To cut the JEneid 

1 With regard to this important matter of the hierarchy 
of the genres one cannot do better than to follow Brune- 
tiere in quoting Taine : " Dans le monde imaginaire, comme 
dans le monde reel, il y a des rangs diver? parce qu'il y 
a des valeurs diverses. Le public et les connaisseurs as- 
signent les uns et estiment les autres. Nous n'avons pas 
fait autre chose depuis cinq ans, en parcourant les ecoles 
(le ritalie, des Pays-Bas, et de la Grece. Nous avons 
toujours, et a chaque pas, porte des jugements. Sans le 
savoir nous avions en main un instrument de mesure. 
Les autres hommes sont comme nous, et en critique comme 
ailleurs il y a des verites acquises, Chacun reconnait 
2 17 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

out of Latin literature would be like putting 
out a man's eye : to cut out Juvenal's Satires 
would be like amputating a finger. " Solvi- 
tur inquirendo." Ask even the most ram- 
pant impressionist — except, perhaps, the 
ultra-Whitmanite — which he would rather 
have written, Shakspere's dramas or Burns's 
songs, Scott's romances or Maupassant's tales, 
Gibbon's Decline and P'all or Macaulay's 
Essays, and the answer will nearly always 
indicate a tacit acceptance of the theory of 
a hierarchy of genres. **A mere instance of 
the force of convention," the VVhitmanite 
might say, " Walt Whitman's Leaves of 
Grass put all the genres to the blush, and 
the academic critics, too. You will not dare 
to mention Shakspere and Milton in the same 
breath with him ! " An advocate of free 
love might make just such a reply to an 
argument in favor of monogamy. 

In fact it can be easily shown that the 
distinctions and gradations sanctioned by the 

aujourd'hui que certains poetes, comme Dante et Shakspere, 
certains compositeurs, comme Mozart et Beethoven, tien- 
nent la premiere place dans leur art. On I'accorde k 
Goethe, parmi les ecrivains de notre siecle ; parmi les 
Hollandais, a Rembrandt; parmi les Venitiens, a Titien. 
Trois artistes de la Renaissance italienne, Leonard de 
Vinci, Michel-Ange, et Raphael, montent d'un consente- 
ment unanime au-dessus de tous les autres," [L*£volution 
des Genres, I. (De la Critique), p. 273.] 
18 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

great critics of the past, and upheld by 
the arguments of the academic critics of the 
present, are founded on just the same basis 
as the distinctions and gradations established 
and supported by the jurist and the scientific 
moralist. The critic may often deal with 
matters of less transcendent importance than 
his fellow-students : but his science, in the 
last analysis, is as securely based as theirs; 
for all three ultimately rest on authority and 
present judgment. He has no such sanctions 
to rely upon as the jurist and the moralist 
have ; hence he is often doomed to see un- 
informed opinions prevail : ^ his domain is 
one that can be easily entered from all sides ; 
hence he is compelled to struggle with nu- 
merous rivals who are continually betraying 
the cause of the science he serves. But he 
feels that his position is at bottom as secure 
as that of any student of any semi-science 
can be; and he bides his time in the hope 
of better days. 

1 " But anybody is qualified, according to everybody, 
for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chymis- 
try and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and 
the polka. But then these are more serious things." 
[Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning, Feb. 17, 1845.] 



19 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 



IV 



We have now seen what, in brief, are the 
contentions of the academic critic ; and we 
must admit that if his claim, that criticism 
rests for its authority on the same basis as 
ethics and law, be estabhshed, it is expedient 
for us, if not incumbent upon us, to give 
criticism its due influence in the formation of 
our literary and artistic tastes and judgments. 
Could we once bring ourselves to do this, 
we should find that the parallel between criti- 
cism and its sister semi-sciences holds very 
closely. Just as there are some ethical prin- 
ciples acted upon by all civilized men, others 
acted upon chiefly by certain races, others 
only by individuals of a high type of char- 
acter, so there are principles of criticism 
universal, racial, and individual in their ap- 
plication. For example, all men have prac- 
tically agreed — at least till the present 
generation — to regard poetry as superior, 
on the whole, to prose ; the French have 
practically agreed that the drama which pre- 
serves the unities is the best for their stage ; 
most highly cultured individuals are agreed 
in giving a greater value to the sonnet as a 

20 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

poetic form than would be accorded it by 
the average reader. In the light of these 
facts we must infer that there are some prin- 
ciples of criticism so binding upon us that 
we ought to endeavor not only to make an 
individual appHcation of them, but also to 
inculcate them in our children ; others which, 
as Americans, EngHshmen, Frenchmen, or 
what not, it will probably be to our advan- 
tage to follow; still others which, in all like- 
lihood, will appeal to us more and more as 
we advance in culture. In short, no man 
who is seeking to develop his literary and 
artistic taste and judgment can afford to be a 
thoroughgoing impressionist any more than 
he can afford to be an absolute individualist 
in his daily life and conduct. 

If there be any force in the above reason- 
ing, it is plain that something at least of M. 
Brunetiere's teaching may be taken to heart 
by us all. The duty of fitting ourselves not 
merely to enjoy the great poetry of the 
world, but to prefer it to all other forms of 
aesthetic enjoyment, may be insisted upon 
with advantage. All men will not attain to 
such enjoyment or such preference ; but this 
is no reason why all men should not be ad- 
monished to make the effort to attain. No 
man follows perfectly the law of Christ; yet 

21 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

no preacher ceases to uphold that law as an 
ideal pattern of conduct. It is clear, then, 
that no man or child should be allowed to 
say complacently, as one so often hears it 
said, *' I don't care for poetry." Perhaps 
they cannot be made to care for it ; but their 
complacency may at least be shaken. 

Again, it is just as certain that there are 
higher and lower genres of poetry as that 
poetry is superior, on the whole, to prose. 
Hence it is our duty to fit ourselves to pre- 
fer the higher genres to the lower. This, 
again, we shall not all attain to. Some peo- 
ple are so constituted that elegiac musings 
and speculations, such as those that make up 
the In Memoriam, will always attract them 
more than the stately march of the Paradise 
Lost, or the subtle beauty and keen interest 
of the Divine Comedy. On the other hand, 
one can find persons who do not care at all 
for such admirable elegiac verse as Lamar- 
tine's Le Lac. In either case, we may be 
unable to correct the bias ; but we need not 
fail to point out that it is an unfortunate one, 
if any reliance may and should be placed 
upon the collective wisdom of the past and 
the trained judgment of the present. 

But our teaching need not stop here. 
There will always be persons who will care 

22 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

more for the subject-matter of a book than 
for the style in which it is written ; yet we 
should none the less insist that it is the duty 
of every man to fit himself to tell a good 
style from a bad, to enjoy an excellent style, 
and to eschew, whenever it is possible, the 
books that are clumsily written. An insist- 
ence upon this matter of taste in style has, 
after many generations, placed French litera- 
ture in its present position of supremacy : a 
failure to insist upon it has left German lit- 
erature where it is to-day. If we Americans 
and Englishmen will only cultivate our taste 
for style, and will remember, too, that prin- 
ciple upon which Matthew Arnold was for- 
ever harping, that great literature needs a 
sound subject-matter, we shall all be saved 
from many bizarre judgments and opinions. 
We shall not then be able to rank Whitman, 
true and great poet though he often was, 
among the dii majores of song, nor to imag- 
ine that Tennyson or Wordsworth or Shelley 
can rightly be mentioned in the same breath 
with Milton. 

Yet, although we shall do well to respect 
the academic critic when he bids us distrust 
our own judgments and consult the authori- 
tative opinions of the best critics past and 
present, it does not follow that we must all 
23 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

endeavor to inform ourselves about the evo- 
lution of genres, the details of literary history, 
or any of the numerous matters that assume 
great importance in the eyes of the profes- 
sional critic. Few of us have the time for 
such minute study: fewer still have any incli- 
nation for it. One can love and get plea- 
sure from flowers without knowing much 
about botany ; similarly, one can love and 
get pleasure from literature without being a 
trained critic. The botanist and the critic, 
to be sure, ought, unless they become dry- 
as-dusts, to have decided advantages over 
the mere lovers of flowers and of books ; 
but the latter are in no bad way if their 
minds and souls have been enlightened in a 
broad and general manner. This broad and I 
general enlightenment will begin to dawn j 
upon us the moment we are brought in con- ) 
tact with great literature and art; provided j 
always that our tendency to excessive indivi- | 
dualism is checked by proper training. Such f 
being the case, we are in duty bound to range | 
ourselves by the side of those academic critics j 
who offer to furnish this training which, as \ 
we have just seen, is by no means technical | 
in character. 



24 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 



Granting, however, that criticism has a cer- 
tain authority over us with regard to the sub- 
mission of our individual judgments relative 
to such matters as the supremacy of poetry 
to prose, of one genre to another, of form to 
formlessness, it would seem to be true also 
that, as we are constituted with varying tastes 
and aptitudes, and brought up in varying 
environments, we are more or less forced to 
form subjective opinions and thus to become 
impressionist critics, at least for the time be- 
ing. If all criticism is, in its essence, subjec- 
tive, and attains objectivity only through its 
subsequent acceptance by minds other than 
the critic's own, which in turn is a subjective 
procedure, it is certain that our own judg- 
ment or opinion with regard to any object of 
art will be of more vital importance to us than 
any conventional judgment or opinion can 
possibly be. In other words, the impres- 
sionist critic would seem to have a role as 
important and a province as extended as the 
academic critic has. 

There can scarcely be two opinions with 
regard to this matter. The fact that there 
25 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

are impressionist critics who are widely read 
and enjoyed seems of itself to prove their 
usefulness. It is not possible to deny that, 
by concentrating themselves upon some fav- 
orite author, artist, book, or painting, impres- 
sionist critics have added to the world's 
knowledge, and, what is more, to its enjoy- 
ment ; that they have actually forged weapons 
for their foes, the academic critics, to use 
against them. Who, for example, has done 
more to make contemporary France return to 
a proper admiration of Lamartine than that 
prince of impressionists, M. Lemaitre? Cer- 
tainly not M. Brunetiere. But impressionists 
are justified in existing not only by the good 
they do, but also by the fact that there is an 
abundant range of work for them to accom- 
phsh. There are regions in the domain of 
literature and art over which the academic 
critic has little or no control. No one should 
affirm, for example, that it is the duty of the 
academic critic to set us rules for the enjoy- 
ment or even full comprehension of that 
department of poetry known as " society 
verse." He can tell us, indeed, that it should 
not be ranked high in the scale of the genres ; 
but, if he be wise, he will scarcely undertake 
to tell us how much we ought to care for it, 
or when it will most appeal to us. 
26 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

The reason for this proper reticence on his 
part is very simple. Society verse does not 
necessarily appeal to the natural man ; and the 
academic critic, in most of his reasoning, finds 
it necessary to give his principles of criticism 
the broadest basis possible. He tells us that 
it is human to admire the sublime and to weep 
at the pathetic ; but he cannot tell us with 
any truth that it is human to smile at the 
cleverness of a smart social set. The aca- 
demic critic feels at home, therefore, in prais- 
ing the Paradise Lost and the Antigone : he 
will do well to leave to the impressionist — 
to the man to the manner born, like the late 
Mr. Locker-Lampson (who indeed could 
theorize also on the subject in an admirable 
way) — the task of initiating us into the 
charming mysteries of society verse. The 
moment, however, that the impressionist goes 
too far in his advocacy of his favorite poet or 
kind of poetry, the academic critic, with his 
broader knowledge and wider range of 
thought, is ready to check him. Pope, for 
instance, is, in many respects, a poet of society 
whom it would be easy for a certain kind of 
impressionist to overrate, and for another 
kind, preferring, let us say, the poetry of 
nature, to underrate, even to the point of pro- 
claiming that the brilliant satirist was no poet 
27 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

at all. Both these extremes of judgment 
would surely be corrected by a competent 
academic critic. 

But not only can the impressionist critic 
serve us as the best possible guide in certain 
well-defined regions of literature and art ; he 
is also the person to help us in the explora- 
tion of new regions. There are genres like 
the novel, the possibilities of which we are 
probably far from knowing thoroughly. With 
respect to present work in these genres, it 
may be questioned whether the training and 
methods of the academic critic fit him for 
doing effective service: he is at his best in 
dealing with genres of which the capabilities 
have been long tested. The impressionist, 
on the other hand, unfettered by rules and 
traditions, is likely to be sympathetic with 
the fresh tentatives which creative genius is 
continually making in what we may call the 
'' unclosed genres." He is the best critic for 
the new writers and, hence, for the majority 
of contemporary readers, who naturally form 
the clientage of the men who are making 
current literature. Then, again, it is the im- 
pressionist critic who is best qualified to 
apply to the literature of the past those fresh 
and novel points of view which each advanc- 
ing generation supplies, — a most important 
28 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

work when it is not undertaken in a captious 
and self-seeking spirit. 

Now surely, if all that has been said be 
true, the role of the impressionist is by no 
means a contemptible one. Not only has he 
certain departments of art and literature prac- 
tically under his control, but he can do his 
share in criticising the men and works of the 
past, and he has the lion's share of the critical 
labors of the present. He has no reason to 
call the academic critic by harsh names ; yet 
he frequently does — se-emingly because, 
being bound by few rules, he forgets that he 
is bound by any, even by those of courtesy. 
He generally takes up a favorite and becomes 
a partisan, after which he fancies that, in 
order to elevate his hero, he must labor not 
merely to subordinate, but to cast down other 
great men. He will praise Tintoretto while be- 
littling Titian ; he will laud Shelley while decry- 
ing Byron ; and he pities the benighted soul 
that in the bonds and fetters of custom still 
grovels before the " crumbling idol." This is 
but to say that, although the role of the impres- 
sionist is a great one, he is often false to it. 
Narrow and bigoted critics of an academic kind 
there have been in abundance ; and they have 
done much harm, but scarcely enough to equal 
that done by the wild impressionists who are 
29 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

forever running amuck through the storied 
realms of art and literature. 



VI 

We are not so much concerned, however, 
with the failings of our two varieties of critics 
as we are with the very practical question, 
how we may get safely steered through the 
wide sea of literature when so many helms- 
men are offering their services; and this 
question we may perhaps answer in part 
by summing up the points we have been 
making. 

We have seen already that, in certain 
matters, we shall do well to rely on the 
academic critics. We have seen that there 
are some universal principles of criticism 
that we should all learn to apply so far as 
we are able, such as the superiority of 
poetry to prose, of one genre to another, 
of form to formlessness. A moment's con- 
sideration will show us, furthermore, that 
corollaries from these principles are easily 
to be drawn and equally to be observed. 
Thus, for example, every schoolboy, not 
merely Macaulay's, should know that Virgil, 
Dante, and Milton, as great epic poets, are 
superior respectively to Horace, Petrarch, 
30 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

and Shelley, as great lyric poets, and should 
be ranked accordingly, and that if he does 
not like the greater poet so much as he 
does the inferior, it is either his own fault 
or his own misfortune, which, unless special 
reasons to the contrary exist, he should seek 
to remedy as best he may. 

Within the same category of poetry, how- 
ever, no such definite assignment of rank is, 
as a rule, possible, save when, as in the cases 
of Homer and Shakspere, a universal con- 
sensus of opinion obtains the force of law. 
It is idle, for instance, to assert dogmatically 
that Dante is a greater poet than Milton, or 
vice versa. Yet nowhere in criticism is there 
more tendency to dogmatic utterance than 
in this very dehcate matter of balancing the 
respective claims of two poets of the same 
type, whose rank is nearly even ; and we 
cannot too often remind ourselves that 
dogma, although necessary perhaps at times, 
is never attractive or satisfactory to the in- 
quiring and aspiring mind. It is open to 
us to urge everything we can in support of 
our favorite's claims, — the wider acceptance 
of Dante and his greater hold upon human 
sympathies, or Milton's treatment of the 
sublime, and his marvellous metrical mas- 
tery, — but, when all is said, when we have 
31 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

ranged the critics and summed up the argu- 
ments pro and con., we must frankly admit 
that there is still room for differences of 
opinion in this case and in all similar cases. 

On the other hand, we cannot too firmly 
crush out such foolish recalcitrancy against 
estabHshed opinion as was once exhibited 
by a college student who, when asked 
^yhether he thought Bacon could have 
written Shakspere's plays, replied indig- 
nantly, being more in love with philoso- 
phy than with poetry : — *' Not much ! He 
would n't have wasted his time on such 
wretched stuff! " That young man was not ^ 
joking, on the principle that a fooHsh ques- f 
tion required a foolish answer: he was 
merely furnishing an unconscious example 
of the folly of untrained impressionist 
criticism. 

Other principles of universal, national, and 
class or individual application might be 
named that are equally binding upon us 
and that measure the extent of our reliance 
upon the academic critic. On the other 
hand, we have already seen that we should 
rely on the impressionist for criticism rela- 
tive to " unclosed genres " like the novel and 
" non-universal genres " like society verse, 
to contemporary writers and artists, and to 



AUTHORITY OF CRITICISM 

the work of the past in all the genres when 
it is necessary to reexamine it from fresh 
and legitimate points of vaew. If we will 
only bear these principles in mind, we shall 
scarcely go greatly astray in choosing our 
critics, or in determining how far to follow 
them. 

But if the critics, on their part, continue 
to assert, as so many of them do, that the 
average reader has no rights and that art 
and literature can be truly appreciated only 
by the elect, the maiidarins^ the public will 
most assuredly continue to- commit its own 
peculiar absurdities, to consider Tom Jones 
an immoral book and Ben Hur a great one ; 
to read a thousand copies of Trilby to ten 
of the Peau de Chagrin ; and to rejoice in 
the flat namby-pambyism of a ** native author 
named Blank " or of a foreign author named 
Double Blank. And who shall blame them 
for their eccentricities, when the authority 
of criticism is so slightly esteemed by nine- 
tenths of the writers who call themselves 
critics? 



33 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 



3$ 



II 

APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

I. INTRODUCTION 

It hardly seems extravagant to say that 
there is not, in the whole range of English 
literature, a more entrancing, a more per- 
plexing, a more irritating subject for study 
and reflection than the life, character, and 
works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. If any one 
doubt the truth of this statement, let him 
spend a few weeks among Shelley's biograph- 
ers and critics. If he do not read some of 
the most cobwebby special pleading ever 
spun, if he do not encounter some of the 
strangest canons of criticism ever promulgated 
this side of the *' visiting moon " ; if he do 
not find himself now hot with indignation, 
now cold with shame, now ready to burst 
with laughter, now ready to weep with sym- 
pathy, at one moment in a heavenly glow for 
the true, the beautiful, and the good, at 
another longing to assist in sending to the 
stake every idealist that ever hinted the essen- 
tial commonplaceness of our everyday life; 
37 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

if he do not, in short, end by debating with 
himself whether he is a confirmed dyspeptic 
or an adjudged lunatic, then he is a most 
cool-headed and thoroughly enviable person. 

But as no one who credits the above truth- 
ful record of my own experiences will be 
likely to enter the enchanted forest of Shel- 
leyan criticism, and as many who have already 
ventured within its depths may be inclined 
to tell a different tale, I feel called upon to 
preface this paper with a few confirmatory 
excerpts culled from my own reading of the 
critics, or, to continue the metaphor, I will 
exhibit a few of the thorns of that enchanted 
forest that were found clinging to my gar- 
ments when I succeeded in effecting my 
escape. 

Mr. Carlyle, who would certainly not have 
owned up to lunacy, although he might have 
confessed with some propriety to being a 
dyspeptic, brought away from what was prob- 
ably a cursory reading of Shelley and his 
critics, the characteristically formed opinion 
that the poet was a " windy phenomenon." 
Mr. Browning, after a profound study of Shel- 
ley, wrote of him as follows in Pauline : 

" And my choice fell 
Not so much on a system as a man — 
On one, whom praise of mine would not offend, 

38 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

Who was as calm as beauty, being such 

Unto mankind as thou to me, Pauline — 

Believing in them and devoting all 

His soul's strength to their winning back to peace ; 

Who sent forth hopes and longings for their sake 

Clothed in all passion's melodies, which first 

Caught me and set me, as to a sweet task, 

To gather every breathing of his songs : 

And woven with them there were words which seemed 

A key to a new world, the muttering 

Of angels of something unguessed by man." 

Years later, in a more mature and nobler 
poem, perhaps the profoundest poem of the 
century, Sordello, he wrote these glowing 
lines : 

" Stay — thou, spirit, come not near 
Now — not this time desert thy cloudy place 
To scare me, thus employed, with that pure face ! 
I need not fear this audience, I make free 
With them, but then this is no place for thee ! 
The thunder-phrase of the Athenian, grown 
Up out of memories of Marathon, 
Would echo like his own sword's griding screech 
Braying a Persian shield, — the silver speech 
Of Sidney's self, the starry paladin. 
Turn intense as a trumpet sounding in 
The knights to tilt, wert thou to hear ! " 

Certainly there is a difference as wide as 

the poles between the judgments of the great 

lay-preacher and of the great poet. Which 

39 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

is right, or are they both expressing half- 
truths only? 

Carlyle and Browning are not, however, 
professional critics, and it is with the latter 
that we are especially concerned. Mr. W. 
M. Rossetti who was asked to write the 
sketch of Shelley which appeared in the last 
edition of the Encyclopcedia Britannica may 
fairly be called one, and I subjoin a sentence 
from his very able article : 

" In his own day an ahen in the world of 
mind and invention, and in our day scarcely 
yet a denizen of it, he [Shelley] appears 
destined to become, in the long vista of years, 
an informing presence in the innermost shrine 
of human thought." 

Not long after Mr. Rossetti wrote the 
above delightfully poised sentence Mr. Mat- 
thew Arnold concluded what was destined to 
be with one exception his last critical utter- 
ance with the following words : 

'' But let no one suppose that a want of 
humor and a self delusion such as Shelley's 
have no effect upon a man's poetry. The 
man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely 
sane, and Shelley's poetry is not entirely sane 
either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision 
of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing 
nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, 
40 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

no less than in life, he is * a beautiful and 
ineffectual angel, beating in the void his 
luminous wings in vain.' " 

Here is a sentence for us as neatly turned 
as Mr. Rossetti's, as positive in its expression 
of individual opinion, and proceeding from a 
far greater hand. But we must contrast this 
again with Mr. Swinburne's vehement dictum 
that Shelley is '* the master singer of our 
modern poets," and must then remember 
that neither Wordsworth nor Keats, both of 
whom had great tact and discernment in all 
matters relating to their art, could appreciate 
Shelley's poetry. 

Nor is the case different with regard to 
Shelley's life, or with regard to his character 
and acquirements. As good and clear- 
headed a man as Charles Kingsley thought 
him a far less lovable character than Byron, 
while Byron, cynic as he was, declared that 
Shelley was the most gentle, the most 
amiable, and least worldly-minded person 
he ever met. As it was in his life-time, so it 
is now and probably ever will be — a most 
difficult matter to determine from the verdicts 
of his critics alone whether he was a spawn 
of Satan or a seraph of light. I have the 
impression that I have somewhere seen him 
styled an archangel, and I am certain that 
41 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

not many years ago a distinguished South- 
ern divine consigned him, in the course of a 
sermon, to the horrors of everlasting flames, 
in company with another picturesque subject 
for damnation, Edgar Allan Poe. 

In view of all these diverging opinions we 
are hardly surprised to discover that critics 
are not quite agreed as to the position to be 
accorded Shelley as a philosopher. We find 
one of his biographers describing him as *' one 
who lived in rarest ether on the topmost 
heights of human thought"; but Mr. Leslie 
Stephen, who is an authority in such matters, 
would hardly seem to recommend the rarity 
of this ether when he writes : ** In truth, 
Shelley's creed means only a vague longing, 
and must be passed through some more phil- 
osophical brain before it can become a fit 
topic for discussion." A vague longing, one 
opines, can be had by a dweller in the hum- 
blest valleys of thought. 

But the biographers who track Shelley to 
these heights of rarefied atmosphere seem 
to succumb to the attenuating influences of 
their environment and to take very rarefied 
views of actions which in our grosser atmo- 
sphere we are wont to call by very gross 
names. Here are some samples. 

It seems to be pretty well agreed, even by 
42 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

Shelley's warmest admirers, that the poet's 
utterances about himself and his surround- 
ings cannot always be accepted with implicit 
faith — in short that Shelley not infrequently, 
whether consciously or unconsciously, did not 
tell the truth. But mark how Professor Dow- 
den, with the approbation of another biog- 
rapher, Mr. Sharp, deals with this little failing. 
Says the Dublin professor : He " was one of 
those men for whom the hard outline of facts 
in their own individual history has little 
fixity; whose footsteps are forever followed 
and overflowed by the wave of oblivion, who 
remember with extraordinary tenacity the 
sentiment of times and of places, but lose 
the framework of circumstance in which the 
sentiment was set ; and who, in reconstructing 
an image of the past, often unconsciously 
supply links and lines upon the suggestion 
of that sentiment of emotion which is for 
them the essential reality." 

Now, although I believe that in Shelley's 
case Professor Dowden has not strayed far 
enough to lose all sight of the truth, I submit 
that the above sentence rarefies facts in a 
way that should commend itself to the heart 
of every lawyer with a guilty client to defend. 
Such a lawyer should also take to heart the 
judgment of Mr. Sharp with regard to his 
43 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

hero's conduct to the unfortunate Harriet, 
" that Shelley, intoxicated with vision of the 
ideal hfe, behaved unwisely, and even wrong- 
fully, in his conduct of certain realities." 

Is it any wonder, I may be permitted to 
ask, that an ordinary mortal Hke myself should 
be glad to escape from the jungle of Shelleyan 
criticism, or that I should feel impelled to 
stop every one I meet, like an Ancient 
Mariner but with a less potent eye, to point 
my moral and adorn my tale? In pursuance 
of this task, whether it be imposed upon me 
by vanity or fate, it will be necessary for me 
to pass in review biographical facts that have 
been discussed thousands of times, and poems 
that every one knows by heart or by critical 
report. Yet this is the lot of all who venture 
to write about famous authors, and I should 
not regret it were it not for the fact that I 
labor under the unpleasant consciousness of 
knowing that sooner or later, I must bring up 
in a camp defended by only one stout soldier, 
that I must fight on under an unpopular flag, 
that I must cut myself off from leaders to 
whom I have always looked up with rever- 
ence and admiration.^ Nevertheless I " can- 
not choose " but speak even though I may not 

1 Especially from my friend Dr. Richard Garnett, whose 

devotion to Shelley is so well known. 

44 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

be able to compel a single wedding-guest 
to hear me out while I say my say about 
Shelley, the man and the poet. 



II. LIFE AND CHARACTER. 

As the experiences of life must furnish the 
materials upon which both the imagination 
and the fancy work, it is always interesting and 
important to know at least the main facts of a 
poet's life. This is especially true in the case 
of Shelley, whose life and whose poetry are, 
to use a word of which he was inordinately 
fond, inextricably " interpenetrated." The 
main facts of this life are fortunately beyond 
dispute, but the judgments to be passed upon 
these facts are unfortunately very far from 
settled. I say the main facts, for it is surely 
of little importance for us to know whether 
Shelley was really attacked and fired upon 
by a burglar at Tannyrallt, or whether he 
was simply suffering from a fit of hallucina- 
tion consequent upon a too copious draught 
from his laudanum bottle, the facts of his 
susceptibility to hallucinations and of his use 
of laudanum being sufficiently attested in 
numerous other instances. We have an 
abundance of consentaneous testimony as to 
45 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

the poet's personal idiosyncrasies, and about 
such facts as his desertion of his first wife 
there is unfortunately no doubt whatsoever. 
But as these facts are familiar to most per- 
sons who are at all interested in literature, it 
will be sufficient here to indicate briefly what 
seem to me to be the chief conclusions one 
ought to draw concerning Shelley's life and 
character. 

The first point that strikes one is, I think, 
the utter absence of all that is spiritual and 
elevating and refined from Shelley's early 
environment. Upon this point, Mr. Arnold 
lays great stress in the essay that has already 
been quoted from, and it is a most important 
point. There probably never was a child 
who would have responded so readily as 
Shelley to ennobling and purifying influences, 
there never was a child who so entirely missed 
them.' There is hardly a trace of any mater- 
nal influence ; and his sisters were too young 
and too much accustomed to worship their 
eccentric but most kind and lovable brother, 
to make any serious or sobering impression 
upon him. His father was a typical English 
squire of the period, who has been rather 
harshly treated by his son's biographers. If 
he was dull, conservative and somewhat 
servile to the powers that be, he was only 

46 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

what his environment made him, and was no 
better or worse than thousands of his contem- 
poraries were then, or than some EngHsh 
squires doubtless are to-day. Nor are such 
characters at all confined to England, for one 
may meet many a Mr. Timothy Shelley in 
this progressive and enlightened country of 
ours. But it was a deplorable fact for 
Shelley that he had such a father, and cer- 
tainly Mr. Timothy Shelley thought that it 
was a deplorable fact for him that he had 
such a son. 

Now a sensitive, high-strung boy, who 
could not find good influences at home, was 
hardly likely to find them at Eton or at 
Oxford during the early part of this century. 
Public schools and universities exercise an ad- 
mirable influence upon normal or only slightly 
abnormal youths, but they never did and 
never will suit natures such as Shelley's was; 
and sensible parents should have recognized 
the fact. Shelley picked up much curious 
information, of course, during his school life, 
which served him in after years, but he did 
not learn what is the best thing that schools 
and colleges teach, to use his common sense. 
It is a very great mistake to think, as so many 
do, that our school days are set apart to 
enable us to use what may be called our 
47 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

uncommon sense; the main duty that lies 
before every child in his school days is to 
learn to use his common reason on common 
things, and it is the main duty of his teacher 
to see that he does it. But none of Shelley's 
teachers seems to have seen or done his duty 
in this regard toward him, and they have in 
consequence suffered at the hands of his 
biographers. Only one has practically es- 
caped censure, the venerable and kindly Dr. 
Lind whom Shelley idoHzed and whom he has 
immortalized as Zonanas in Prince Athanase, 
and the hermit in Laon and Cythna. Now, while 
not meaning to disparage Dr. Lind's kindness, 
I must record my conviction that he is one of 
the most unwholesome influences connected 
with Shelley's early hfe. I long believed that 
I was the only person in the world that held 
this opinion, until I found that Mr. John 
Cordy Jeaffreson maintains it with great vigor 
in his able but unfair biography of the poet, 
the question-begging title of which (The 
Real Shelley) ought to warn off the unini- 
tiated. My charge against Dr. Lind is simply 
this, — that, having gained a strong influence 
over his impressionable pupil, he failed, so 
far as the records show, to use that influence 
to any good purpose. We know, indeed, 
that he encouraged Shelley in that fondness 

48 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

for thin and cloudy metaphysical discussion 
which was afterwards to lead to his expulsion 
from Oxford, to his sins as a mystifying 
rhetorician when he should have been writing 
divine poetry, and finally to his being labelled 
by practical, or rather would-be practical 
men like Carlyle, *' a windy phenomenon." 
We know also, that he encouraged Shelley 
to dabble in science, which was about as bad 
as encouraging him to dabble in metaphysics. 
If he had taught Shelley to love science with 
the wholesome thoroughness of a sound 
mind impressed with her wonders, he would 
have conferred an inestimable boon upon him. 
As it was, he gave him a fatal bias toward 
dabbling that affected his whole after career, 
and furnished Matthew Arnold an excuse for 
labelHng him with that terrible adjective 
ineffectual. Dr. Lind seems to me to have 
been the only man who had a chance to set 
Shelley's feet upon the paths of common- 
sense, and I believe that had he tried he 
could have become a saving and corrective 
influence to one of the noblest but most 
erratic spirits that ever *' lighted upon this orb 
which " he " hardly seemed to touch." How 
much English poetry, and so the whole world, 
would have profited by this influence, cannot 
be estimated. But Dr. Lind's talent has long 
4 49 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

since been removed from its covering napkin, 
and it is by no means certain that I have not 
done him grave injustice by coupling his 
name with the undesirable notoriety that 
attaches to the slothful servant of the parable. 

I must pass over Shelley's Oxford career 
in spite of the fascination which Hogg's 
description thereof must always lend to it. 
As at Eton, he found no one to guide him, 
no one to sympathize with him save Hogg, 
who, though commonsense and practical 
enough in some respects, and though de- 
voted to Shelley, was hardly the proper per- 
son to correct his extravagances. Certainly 
the dons who drew up their sentence of ex- 
pulsion before they had given the youthful 
atheist a chance to exculpate himself, simply 
fitted in with the rest of his soul-cramping 
environment. They were doubtless honest 
enough, however, in their belief that Shelley 
was fast speeding to the devil and endeavor- 
ing to drag his sleepy University with him, 
and the young visionary was probably more 
contumacious than his friend Hogg has seen 
fit to record. 

One could wish one might pass over with 
equal rapidity the few years that connected 
Shelley with the unfortunate Harriet West- 
brook, but it cannot be done. In those 
50 



APRO;POS OF SHELLEY 

years was to be gathered the first bitter 
fruit of his reckless and ill-trained youth ; 
and in those years the Muse of English 
Poetry had to bewail the marring and almost 
total undoing of what promised to be the 
purest, the most beautiful spirit that had 
ever been born to do her service. But if 
one cannot pass over these years, one may 
at least presuppose that every one is familiar 
with the harrowing facts on which one has 
to base one's judgments and one can give 
those judgments briefly. 

Shelley, as we all know, had by this time 
broken completely with the past. He had 
dabbled in science natural and occult, had 
carried his metaphysical speculations to the 
verge of absurdity, and had announced that 
he loathed history. He had overleaped all 
prejudices of caste and become a radical in 
political and social matters. Being the most 
sincere and courageous of mortals, having in 
him the stuff of which the martyr and the 
hero are made, loving his fellow-man with 
all the intensity of his nature, ever aspiring 
toward what he believed to be the true, the 
beautiful and the good, he was not likely to 
share the fate of most young enthusiasts of 
twenty, to sow his wild oats and settle down 
into a well-to-do, conservative man of family, 
51 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY \ 

a smug and contented laudator temporis acti. \ 
What Shelley believed, that he would do, and j 
hence the pitiable necessity under which his \ 
friends and relatives labored of teaching him | 
what to believe. But what had Mr. Timothy • 
Shelley, what had the Oxford dons, what had j 
Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, finally what had | 
dabbling Dr. Lind to teach this genius of a ) 
youth who could pierce their commonplace I 
theories of religion and politics and social 
life as easily as an eagle can pierce the web i 
of gossamer which an adventurous spider has j 
woven over its nest? And what had the j 
times to teach him? for when a youth cannot i 
be taught by his intimates, he sometimes j 
finds in the writings of great contemporaries I 
or in the march of the world's progress les- j 
sons of the highest import to his inquiring j 
soul. \ 

The times taught him precisely what his |: 
own spirit felt naturally toward its environ- |! 
ment — revolt, self-sufficiency in its best sense, \ 
aspiration. The forces of the French Revolu- 
tion had by no means spent their strength. | 
In spite of Napoleon, men were everywhere 
dreaming of liberty and of the glories that : 
awaited the enfranchised spirit of man. The j 
world was severed from its hateful past and 
history was now of less value than the vision- \ 
52 i 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

ary dreams of any self-appointed prophet. 
Kings were bat creatures set by Providence 
upon thrones for the sons of liberty to take 
a savage pleasure in overthrowing them. 
The giant custom was to be slain by a 
pebble from the sling of some philosophic 
David; reHgion, law, morality were to be 
annihilated or metamorphosed, and a new 
heaven was to look down upon a new earth. 
Such was the Zeitgeist whose wings fanned 
the forehead of Shelley and it was against 
the breathings of this spirit that the wingless 
words of Mr. Timothy Shelley and his like 
had to contend. 

But if sober wisdom was not to flow in 
upon Shelley from his contemplation of the 
world's mad vortex, he was in still less likeli- 
hood of obtaining it from the lips or from 
the pens of his contemporaries. Although 
he was not unfamiliar with the great writers 
of the past these could not have influenced 
him very profoundly, simply because they 
belonged to that past which the present 
seemed determined to break with. We of 
this generation can see that if he could have 
been brought under the spell of Burke, there 
might have been some salvation for him; 
but Burke was at a discount among fiery 
enthusiasts in 1812. Instead of Burke Mr. 
53 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

Timothy Shelley recommended Paley, at the 
mention of whom our young poet fairly 
foamed at the mouth when he ought merely 
to have smiled. Paley versus Shelley savors 
somewhat of the ridiculous, as Mr. Arnold 
intimates. 

But to whom else could he apply? Words- 
worth, it is true, had written most of his best 
poetry and Shelley had read it, but was not 
Wordsworth, too, bitten by the revolutionary 
frenzy, and did not Shelley address him a 
very mournful sonnet when the elder poet 
began to show signs of increasing conserva- 
tism? Southey too he had read and liked 
— but could Southey help him, especially 
after they became personally acquainted? 
Could Coleridge have helped him as he 
afterwards claimed that he could? Were 
Walter Scott's delightful poems likely to con- 
tain the antidote to revolutionary views, or 
the youthful poems of Byron? No — there 
was not one living author in England who 
could have done him good, but there was 
one who did him infinite harm. 

It would not profit us to consider here how 
the thin speculations of William Godwin at- 
tained their astonishing vogue, or to analyze 
those speculations, interesting as the task 
would prove. Godwin was a man of un- 
54 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

doubted talents, as any one that has read 
Caleb Williams or St. Leon will admit, and 
the impossible anarchistic and free love the- 
ories of his ** Political Justice " were cer- 
tainly presented with no little power. They 
were just such theories as suited the vision- 
ary, sympathetic, and revolutionary youth 
who had outraged his father and his teachers ; 
and when Shelley took up a theory he acted 
on it except when he could see plainly that 
it hurt another. Nor could Shelley take up 
g theory without endeavoring to make prose- 
lytes to it, and so we see his star surely and 
by inevitable necessity drawing into its orbit 
that milder star that was soon to be lost to 
the sky ■■ — the star of the unfortunate woman 
whose name is forever linked with his. 

But why pursue the harrowing story? 
Could the ill-sorted union of a revolutionary 
young aristocrat destitute of common sense 
and a half atheistical, half evangelical young 
female of low extraction and romantic aspira- 
tions have any other ending than that cold 
grave in the Serpentine? Blame Shelley as 
much as we will — and he deserves blame — 
we shall still find back of the whole sad story 
just what we shall find back of the expulsion 
from Oxford, back of his sickening love af- 
fairs, back of every foolish and uncanny ac- 
55 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

tion of his life, that terrible lack of common 
wisdom which results always, or nearly al- 
ways, from an unpropitious environment. 

But when Shelley separated himself from 
Harriet, did he find the environment he 
needed? How could he with Godwin for a 
father-in-law — Godwin ever whining and beg- 
ging, a most grasping philosopher in spite of 
his doctrines of equality — with poor Fanny 
Imlay (Mary Shelley's half sister) commit- 
ting suicide for love, it is said, of her poet 
brother-in-law — with Jane Claremont and 
her unhappy intrigue with Lord Byron — 
with Byron himself plunged in dissipation 
and sick of life? Some of these were, we 
may suspect, worse for him than Harriet's 
sister, that Eliza with the pock-marked face 
and the shock of hair, who kept all the 
money of the establishment in her own 
pocket, whom Shelley first loved and finally 
execrated in the following language: "I 
sometimes feel faint with the fatigue of 
checking the overflowings of my unbounded 
abhorrence for this miserable wretch." 

This is a little strong even when it is 
written about a sister-in-law. Poor Shelley — 
he was always, to use a homely metaphor, 
jumping from the frying-pan into the fire 
with regard to the " company he kept," es- 

56 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

pecially the women. At first sight his new 
acquaintances are divine, in six months they 
are made of the commonest clay. Who will 
ever forget that Miss Hitchener with whom 
he began a platonic correspondence, whom 
he persuaded to break up her school and 
take up her residence with him and Harriet, 
whose praises he sounded under the poetic 
name of Portia, though she was really Eliza 
the Second, whom finally he wound up by 
calling the " Brown Demon " and by bribing 
her to leave his house. Was such a man 
sane? 

But Shelley did make one great, one ines- 
timable gain by his connection with Godwin. 
He gained a noble and sympathetic woman 
for his wife — a woman who was to share his 
trials, soothe his wounded and weary spirit, 
and finally after his death to plead success- 
fully with a cold world for his memory. This 
was much more than he had a right to ask, 
and so his last years were far happier than he 
had any right to expect. Indeed after the 
soul-harrowing struggle which he made to 
! retain his children by his first wife, through- 
out the whole period of his second visit to 
Italy, Shelley's environment was in most re- 
spects all that his better nature could have 
desired. Byron grew to love him and so 
57 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

avoided shocking him or exerting much, if 
any^ deleterious influence upon him; the 
Williamses, the Gisbornes, Medwin, Trelawny, 
Peacock, Leigh Hunt were pleasant compan- 
ions, and Mary Shelley was the noblest of 
wives. But for the silly episode of Emilia 
Viviani, these Italian days of Shelley were as 
sunshiny and pure as Italian days should 
ever be. He was maturing in his powers, 
had refined the crudity of many of his earlier 
theories, and with renewed health might have 
looked forward to accomplishing work that 
would have thrown in the shade his previous 
labors in song, when by an unhappy accident, 
or perhaps a despicable crime, he was sent W 
ftieet his death in the bosom of that element 
he had loved so well. 

But we have assuredly dwelt long enough 
on Shelley's unfavorable environment, and we 
are, some of us, doubtless prepared to admit 
with Mr. Arnold that Shelley was not en- 
tirely sane. We shall hardly look upon him 
as a spawn of Satan, but we shall wish that 
he could have been blessed with more com- 
mon sense. There is, however, another side 
of Shelley's life and character which we have 
as yet only glanced at and which we must 
flow consider at more length, although we 
ean by flo means give it the attention it 
58 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

deserves. Unless we bring this side into 
view, we shall fail to comprehend at all how 
Shelley has come by his many admirers, per- 
haps I should say, his many worshippers. 

As I have already stated, Shelley was 
one of the most fascinating and lovable of 
men. Even his bizarre and uncanny pecul- 
iarities strengthened the charm that he ex- 
erted on cynics like Byron, cool common- 
sense persons Hke Hogg, dilettante- natures 
like Hunt, and pure, sweet enthusiasts like 
Mary Godwin. But Shelley's charm did not 
proceed from his eccentricities, or from the 
magic of his conversation, or from the glow 
reflected upon him from the enchanted at- 
mosphere of fanciful thought and feehng in 
which he moved habitually. Shelley's charm 
came from the essential simplicity of his char- 
acter, a statement which will appear paradoxi- 
cal to those who have been chiefly struck by 
the complexity of the problems connected 
with the poet's life. They will recognize at 
once that it is a paradox, for nothing can be 
more clearly established than the fact that 
Shelley's was an essentially simple nature. 
And by simple I mean, of course, sitje plica^ 
without a fold, a straightforward nature aiming 
to put itself in harmony with the universe, not 
a doubling, dissimulating nature, in spite of 
59 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

Mr. Jeaffreson's charges and of Shelley's own 
inconsistencies of statement, never in perfect 
harmony even with itself. Shelley's nature 
can be summed up in one word — love. He 
loved man in the most thoroughgoing sense 
of that great and often misused word "phil- 
anthropy " — he loved beauty whether in 
woman, or flower, or wave, or sky, or in the 
creations of art, or in the abstractions of the 
human mind. But a simple, perfect love does 
not dominate the world of thought alone, it 
dominates the world of action also. Hence 
Shelley's whole life was given up to deeds of 
love, to obeying the promptings of the spirit 
that swayed him. But mark how the very 
nobility and simplicity of his nature betrayed 
him when he sought to put it into action, 
how it led his sun-fed and light-sustained 
body through the thorns and briers of life. 
Every action implies a subject and an object, 
and for an action to be good it must be in 
harmony with the essential nature of both 
subject and object. Yet how is the subject 
to know that an action which is in entire har- 
mony with it will be in entire harmony with 
the object toward which it is directed ? There 
is no possible way of arriving at this knowl- 
edge except the rough way which we call 
gaining wisdom or common sense. Some 
60 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

natures seem, indeed, to have an intuition of 
the rightfulness or the wrongfulness of ac- 
tions, and to them Wordsworth refers in his 
noble Ode to Duty as 

" Glad hearts without reproach or blot 
Who do thy work and know it not." 

But this intuition will not answer long in our 
jarring world, and Wordsworth recognizes the 
fact when he prays : — 

" Long may the kindly impulse last ; 
But thou, if they should totter, teach them to 
stand fast." 

The duty, however, which Wordsworth 
prays to cannot well be separated from what 
we also know as wisdom and, under humbler 
circumstances, as common sense. Shelley, 
therefore, if he was to obey the promptings 
of the spirit that swayed him — that exquisite 
spirit of love with which he was more com- 
pletely " interpenetrated " than any other child 
of man has been in these latter days — needed 
of all men to have wisdom to guide him in 
his actions; because being so conscious of 
the purity of his own motives, he was the less 
likely to pause and consider whether his ac- 
tions would redound to the good of his fellow 
men and women. Here, alas ! was the rock 
6i 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

Oft which Shelley split — he had no com- 
mon sense, he had little practical wisdom, cer- 
tainly in his earlier years, and he had an 
uncontrollable longing to follow the impulses 
of his nature. What wonder that he wrecked 
his life in whirlpools, what wonder that in his 
own beautiful, self-depicting words — 

'^ He fled astray 
With feeble steps o'er the world^s wilderness, 
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, 
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their 
prey." 

It is this inability of Shelley's to regulate 
his actions that Mr. Arnold referg to when he 
speaks of Shelley's lack of humor and his 
self-delusion. Shelley was always pursuing 
the true, the beautiful, and the good, and 
since he had not wisdom to guide him, he 
was continually thinking that he had found 
those desirable qualities embodied in some 
one person who sooner or later turned out 
to be an idol of clay. Having imagined that 
Emilia Viviani embodied them, he must 
forsooth become her slave and write that 
wonderful Epipsychidion in which he de- 
clared that she was the sutt of his life, 
while his faithful and noble Wife, Mary, was 
the moon. He did not stop for a moment 
62 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

to think that what he had written affected 
two women injuriously — making one silly 
woman sillier, and rendering a true and de- 
serving woman temporarily unhappy. So 
it was with the unfortunate Harriet. Shelley 
could not see that the theories which were 
for the time true for him, were very bad 
theories with which to inoculate a by no 
means strong-minded girl of sixteen. Never- 
theless, he proceeds to inoculate her, marries 
her without loving her, deserts her because 
he has found the true, the beautiful, and the 
good embodied in Mary Godwin, and then 
invites her to come and live with Mary and 
himself because he has no idea that he 
has done anything wrong. He has simply 
followed the promptings of the spirit he 
served, but he has followed them without 
exercising his common sense. In other 
words he has shown a lack of humor, a self- 
delusion that are astounding. 

But there are often times when a lack of 
humor and a self-delusion that are astound- 
ing do not prevent a man like Shelley from 
moving like an angel among his fellow men. 
Think of him visiting the huts of the poor at 
Marlow, tending the sick, distributing money 
and food to them, actually walking a hospital 
that he may learn for their benefit something 
63 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

of practical medicine. Think of the oph- 
thalmia caught in his constant ministrations 
to the sick, think of his subscriptions to 
public charities, think of his sweet treatment 
of the importunate Godwin, think of his 
sympathy for every living thing, man or 
beast, and then say if your heart does not 
glow toward this man. Even his rash pil- 
grimages for the emancipation of Ireland 
cease to be ridiculous when we remember 
the noble love of liberty that prompted 
them, when we remember that many of the 
reforms he proposed have been since carried 
out by the peaceful means he advised. We 
have, of course, to set against this ideal, 
angelic Shelley, the silly, almost demoniac 
Shelley raging at kings and statesmen and 
priests with a wearisome iteration. But this 
uncontrolled hatred of customs and institu- 
tions that most men cherish was but another 
manifestation of Shelley's spirit of love un- 
controlled by wisdom. Love for mankind 
was for him inextricably bound up with love 
for liberty, and love for liberty with intense 
natui es means hate for tyranny ; but Shelley 
had not the wisdom to see that too often 
what he called liberty was simply license. 
Hence his ravings and hence our paradox 
that his hatred of kings was only a manifes- 

64 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

tation of his spirit of unbounded love. 
But a spirit of unbounded love will have 
worshippers to the end of time. 

This subject has fascination enough, how- 
ever, to keep us pursuing it indefinitely, and 
we may as well pass on. It is impossible 
to compass even the salient points of 
Shelley's life and character in an essay : but 
it is to be hoped that we have done enough 
to enable us to approach his poetry in a 
sufficiently critical but at the same time 
friendly mood. 



III. THE POEMS. 

In discussing Shelley's work as a writer it 
will be well for us to confine ourselves to 
his original poetry. If this were a treatise 
instead of an essay it would not be difficult 
to devote more than one chapter to setting 
forth his merits as a translator of poetry and 
as a writer of distinguished and charming 
prose. We need not yield even to Mr. 
Arnold himself in our admiration for Shelley 
in these two capacities, although we may 
not share the great critic's opinion that it 
is as a translator and a prose writer that 
posterity will chiefly appreciate one who is 
5 65 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

very frequently styled at present " the poets' 
poet" 

I know of nothing in the realm of poetic 
eal translation that approaches the delight- 
ful and inimitable Hymn to Mercury or 
the equally inimitable, though to me less 
charming, scenes from the masterpieces 
of Calderon and Goethe. Nor do I sup- 
pose that in its way Shelley's nervous 
prose with its individual rhythm and its 
almost invariably sound 9.nd sane content 
can easily find an equal. When he aban- 
dons himself to the looser measures of 
rhythmic prose, when his inspiration ceases 
to master him and he masters his own 
genius, he displays a tact, a sureness of 
touch thgit almost make us forget the lack 
of wisdom and of grasp upon reality that 
are so painfully apparent in his life and, I 
may add, although this is somewhat fore- 
stalling matters, in his original poetry. But 
no translator, no prose writer, however distin- 
guished, can claim the place in literature that 
is always ungrudgingly assigned to the emin- 
ently original poet, and Sheljey's wor- 
shippers have never been willing to forgo 
pressing his claims for the higher place. 
Here is the true crux of Shelleyan criti- 
cism, and it is to the question of Shelley's 
66 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

position as an original poet that for the 
present at least the energies of his critics 
must be directed. 

To a superficial observer the question 
would seem, at first sight, if not to have 
solved itself with time, to be at any rate in 
a fair way of doing so. Shelley's star has 
been steadily rising ever since his death. 
In his Hfe he found few admirers, and 
Byron, Moore, and even many whose names 
are now almost forgotten, eclipsed him in 
critical as well as in popular favor. Soon, 
however, his admirers became more numer- 
ous and bolder. The uncanny events of his 
life were viewed in a soberer and fairer 
light, and his work received more impartial 
criticism. The sun of Byron began to pale 
before the rising sun of Tennyson as after 
a period of revolution and stormy passions 
the world began to sigh for the peace of 
conservatism and the luxury of allowing 
play to calm emotions and delicate sensi- 
bihties. This desire for calm and the lib- 
erty and equality which had been made an 
influential aspiration, if not an achieved 
possession, of the human spirit, produced 
a type of civilization characterized by many 
distinctively feminine traits. Gentleness, 
receptivity to sentiments and ideas, a rec- 

67 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

ognition of the virtue and power that lie 
in patient forbearance and pathetic weak- 
ness, these and many other distinctively 
feminine traits began to dominate the world 
and have continued to dominate it. Natur- 
ally the effects of this change of the world's 
spirit were seen in literature, and Tennyson's 
Princess may be taken as its first fairly ade- 
quate expression. But obviously this change 
was in favor of Shelley and to the detri- 
ment of Byron. The poet of stormy pas- 
sions, of intense, over-weening masculinity, 
was out of touch with this new world ; the poet 
who preached love to man and beast and 
flower, who spun rainbow-hued visions of the 
speedy advent of a golden age of harmony 
and peace, whose character even, when closely 
examined, was found to be in many respects 
that of a feminine angel — if angels may 
be said to distribute themselves between 
the sexes — became more and more a sub- 
ject for veneration and love to the advanced 
and enlightened spirits of the new rt^gime. 
The populace took to Tennyson and Long- 
fellow, but the critics and the ultras of all 
shades took to Shelley, with here and there 
an aesthete who preferred Keats, or some 
more ambitious prober of mysteries who 
gave his allegiance to Browning. Then 
68 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

came the Pre-Raphaelite movement in paint- 
ing and poetry which naturally worked in 
favor of a hazy poet and under the influences 
of which the best of our younger critics 
have been reared. 

So the fact appears to be that time is set- 
tling the value of Shelley's poetry for us, 
since if the critics cleave to him long enough, 
they will eventually bring the people to him. 
It is seldom that an author remains indefi- 
nitely balanced between critical appreciation 
and popular indifference. Landor seems to 
hang thus suspended, but as a rule either the 
people will bring the critics to their view of 
the matter, as in the case of Bunyan, or the 
critics will educate the people to a more or 
less willing acceptance of the views of the 
enlightened, as seems now to be the case with 
Browning. If the critics as a class continue 
to stand by Shelley, his cause may fairly be 
considered as won. But although such a 
stout phalanx as Swinburne, Dowden, Sharp, 
the Rossettis, Saintsbury, Symonds, Wood- 
berry, Garnett, Myers, Forman, Stopford 
Brooke, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Andrew 
Lang, Thomas S. Baynes, and a host of 
others, to say nothing of the Shelley Society, 
has stood by and is still standing by Shelley, 
there is one voice of dissent that makes itself 

69 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

heard, a voice potent enough to arrest our 
attention and to awaken our interest. It is, 
the voice of the greatest English critic of this 
century, with the possible exception of Col- 
eridge, Mr. Matthew Arnold. 

But what is one man against so many, one 
will ask? Not much, I answer, for the pres- 
ent, but a great deal for the future if he hap- 
pens to have truth on his side, and if he has 
recorded himself with sufficient fulness; for 
the value of the rest of his critical work m 
bound to lend some authority to his most; 
extreme utterance even when this seemst to hM 
opposed to the judgment of the wisest of his 
contemporaries. It is the voice which is at 
first drowned in the discord of dissent or cen- 
sure that in the majority of cases is heard 
full and clear by the generations that follow.. 
Can we be sure that this will not be the ea^^ 
with Arnold's utterances as to Shelley? Fof 
my part, even if I had committed myself a% 
a pronounced Shelleyan, even if I had written, 
a commentary in the most approved moderii 
style on a single passage in the works of my 
favorite, I should still deep down in my 
heart feel a dread of the future when I listened 
to the clear yet calm voice of such a dissent^, 
ing critic as Matthew Arnold. And his 
uniqueness, the fact of his standing alone, of 
70 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

his unflinching boldness of utterance would 
increase the dread, for it is just such unique 
and bold utterances that in nine cases out of 
ten win the suffrages of posterity. At any 
rate, being no pronounced Shelleyan I pro- 
pose to give Mr. Arnold a more respectful 
hearing in the following pages than he has 
usually had at the hands of modern critics. 

Before proceeding, however, to examine 
Arnold's views it may be well for us to re- 
member that he was not handicapped in his 
criticism of Shelley, as Kingsley was, by his 
own more or less intimate dependence upon 
the established order of things. Arnold was, 
if not as blatantly, nevertheless as completely 
at discord with orthodox Christianity as 
Shelley was. It is open to grave doubt 
whether he b.elieved in the immortality of the 
soul, which Shelley certainly did. Arnold 
was also a republican at heart and a believer 
in equality, even if he did not rave against 
kings and statesmen with conservative lean- 
ings. He was furthermore a product with 
Shelley, though a more ripened product, of 
the liberal, the European movement in liter- 
ature which received its initial impulse from 
Goethe. He was therefore not unqualified 
either by nature or by training to sit in judg- 
ment upon Shelley. 

n 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

It would not be possible nor would it be 
desirable to cite here all Arnold's obiter dicta 
respecting Shelley's poetry — he did not live 
to write his promised essay about it — hence 
I shall content myself with quoting three 
passages from his writings that set forth his 
views with sufficient fulness, reserving my 
own discussion of Shelley's poems until we 
have felt the full force of the most weighty 
indictment that has been brought against 
them. 

A lucid statement of one of Arnold's chief 
charges against Shelley as a poet occurs in the 
essay on Maurice de Guerin : 

" I have said that poetry interprets in two 
ways ; it interprets by expressing with magi- 
cal felicity the physiognomy and movement of 
the outward world, and it interprets by ex- 
pressing with inspired conviction the ideas 
and laws of the inward world of man's moral 
and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry 
is interpretative both by having natural magic 
in it, and by having moral profundity. In 
both ways it illuminates man ; it gives him a 
satisfying sense of reality; it reconciles him 
with himself and the universe. . . . Shak- 
spere interprets both when he says, 

" ' Full many a glorious morning have I seen 
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovran eye ; * 
72 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

and when he says, 

" ' There 's a divinity that shapes our ends, 
Rough-hew them how we will.' 

. . . Great poets unite in themselves the faculty 
of both kinds of interpretation, the naturalistic 
and the moral. But it is observable that in 
the poets who unite both kinds, the latter 
(the moral) usually ends by making itself the 
master. In Shakspere the two kinds seem 
wonderfully to balance one another ; but even 
in him the balance leans ; his expression tends 
to become too little sensuous and simple, too 
much intellectualized. The same thing may 
be yet more strongly affirmed of Lucretius 
and Wordsworth. In Shelley there is not a 
balance of the two gifts, nor even a coexist- 
ence of them both, but there is a passionate 
straining after them both, and this is what 
makes Shelley, as a man, so interesting: I 
will not inquire how much Shelley achieves 
as a poet, but whatever he achieves, he in 
general fails to achieve natural magic in his 
expression; in Mr. Palgrave's charming 
Treastiry may be seen a whole gallery of his 
failures." 

To this passage Mr. Arnold added a foot- 
note contrasting Shelley's Lines Written in 
the Euganean Hills with Keats's Ode to 
73 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

Autumn as follows : " The latter piece ren- 
ders Nature, the former tries to render her. 
I will not deny, however, that Shelley has 
natural magic in his rhythm ; what I deny is, 
that he has it in his language. It always 
seems to me that the right sphere for Shelley's 
genius was the sphere of music, not of poetry ; 
the medium of sounds he can master, but to 
master the more difficult medium of words, 
he has neither intellectual force enough, nor 
sanity enough." 

Passing over other interesting but not es- 
pecially important references to Shelley, we 
come to the concluding paragraphs of the 
noble essay on The Study of Poetry which 
was prefixed to Ward's " Selections." Arnold 
has been speaking of the wholesomeness of 
much of Burns's poetry and suddenly he ex- 
claims with a warning voice : " For the votary 
misled by a personal estimate of Shelley, as 
so many of us have been, are, and will be -^ of 
that beautiful spirit building his many-colored 
haze of words and images 

' Pinnacled dim in the intense inane ' 

no contact can be wholesomer than the con- 
tact with Burns at his archest and soundest." 
And he proceeds to point his warning 
by contrasting four lines from the " Prome- 

74 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

theus Unbound with four lines from Tarn 
Glen. 

Finally from the Essay on Byron we may 
take our last quotation : *' I cannot think 
that Shelley's poetry except by snatches and 
fragments, has the value of the good work of 
Wordsworth and Byron. . . . Shelley knew 
quite well the difference between the achieve- 
ment of such a poet as Byron and his own. 
He praises Byron too unreservedly, but he 
felt, and he was right in feeling, that Byron 
was a greater poetical power than himself. 
As a man, Shelley is at a number of points im- 
measurably Byron's superior ; he is a beauti- 
ful and enchanting spirit, whose vision, when 
we call it up, has far more loveliness, more 
charm for our soul, than the vision of Byron. 
But all the personal charm of Shelley cannot 
hinder us from at last discovering in his 
poetry the incurable want, in general, of a 
sound subject matter, and the incurable fault, 
in consequence, ot unsubstantiality. Those 
who extol him as the poet of clouds, the 
poet of sunsets, are only saying that he did 
not, in fact, lay hold upon the poet's right 
subject-matter ; and in honest truth, with all 
his charm of soul and spirit, and with all his 
gift of musical diction and movement, he 
never, or hardly ever, did . . ." The rest 
75 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

of this passage containing Mr. Arnold's 
praise of the translations and prose works 
need not be cited, but it may be remarked 
that it is at the close of this essay on Byron 
that the famous phrase which has been already 
quoted first occurs : " Shelley, beautiful and 
ineffectual angel, beating in the void his 
luminous wings in vain." When some years 
after he had occasion to repeat this phrase 
Arnold underscored the word ineffectual. 

And now I think we can form a pretty 
plain idea of the nature of the charges that 
his greatest critic has made against Shelley's 
poetry. If they are not ruthless, they may 
certainly be termed vital. If Arnold is right, 
Shelley cannot be a great poet of the highest 
rank. We see also that Arnold's charges 
may be summed up very briefly. Shelley's 
poetry does not show moral profundity though 
it shows a straining after it ; it does not show 
natural magic in its language although it 
does show it in its musical rhythm ; it lacks 
a sound subject-matter and hence is charac- 
terized by the incurable fault of unsubstan- 
tiality. This is the sum and substance of 
Arnold's criticism, and the important question 
for us now is — can this criticism be deemed 
just? There is only one way to test it and 
that is to read Shelley's chief poems in the 

76 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

light or the darkness of Arnold's dicta, and 
then sum up our fresh impressions and form 
our judgments accordingly. It would be 
better still if my reader were able to do 
as I did — viz., re-read all Shelley's poems 
several years after reading Arnold's strictures 
and then re-read the strictures in the light of 
the poetry. Few probably who have done this 
will find themselves so nearly in accord with 
the critic as I did, and fewer still will in read- 
ing The Revolt of Islam rediscover Shel- 
ley's lack of natural magic in his language 
without sufficient recollection of Arnold's 
essay to enable them to give their rediscov- 
ery a proper name. But now let us turn to 
the poems themselves, omitting the juvenile 
works and beginning with Alastor. 

Many critics go into ecstasies over this 
semi-autobiographic effusion and some of us 
when sound delighted more than sense, proba- 
bly went wild over it ourselves. Now unfor- 
tunately the opening lines are too plainly 
suggestive of Wordsworth ; the famous pas- 
sage beginning: 

" His wandering step 
Obedient to high thoughts has visited 
The awful ruins of the days of old : 
Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste 
Where stood Jerusalem " 

77 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

is grand, but with the grandeur of Milton not 
of Shelley; the straining after an impossible 
ideal is pathetic but not stimulating, and the 
whole atmosphere of the poem is unreal, as 
unreal as the poet's geography. Alastor is 
chiefly interesting for two reasons — it is 
autobiographic and Shelley is an interesting 
character and it has a fine, I may say, at 
times a superb and original rhythmical flow. 
But a poem autobiographical of Shelley Gould 
not well be sane — could not have a sound 
subject-matter, could only embody a strain- 
ing after moral profundity, which is but to 
confirm Arnold's sure judgment. It is its 
rhythm only that lifts it out of the mass of 
immature poetry in which our literature is 
rich, and Arnold is not backward in his praise 
of Shelley's rhythm. Alastor may be dis- 
missed so far as specific criticism is con- 
cerned, with the remark that the charge so 
often made against Byron that he only paints 
himself, can be made fully as justly against 
Shelley, and that Byron at least describes a 
strong personality, Shelley a weak although 
a pathetic one. 

This judgment, which I confess sounds 
harsh and irreverent, but is made in all sober- 
ness, may be illustrated by a recurrence to 
the famous if somewhat twisted dictum of 

78 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

Milton that poetry should be simple, sensu- 
ous, impassioned. Alastor, and indeed all 
Shelley's other elaborate poems, fail of sim- 
plicity because simplicity implies a sound 
subject-matter treated by a sound mind and 
inevitably appeahng to all other sound minds. 
Our analysis of Shelley's character, however, 
forbade us to hope for any such simplicity 
in his poetry, for we saw that his environ- 
ment had failed to give him that wisdom 
which would have directed his essentially 
simple nature whether in its actions or in its 
poetical self-deHneations. 

Alastor and Shelley's other poems are 
sensuous in one respect — their rhythm, which 
can be proved by any one with an ear for 
poetic rhythm and which justifies Mr. Swin- 
burne in saying that Shelley is ** the master 
singer of our modern poets " and Mr. Arnold 
in speaking of Shelley's genius as being pe- 
culiarly suited to the sphere of music. But 
little of Shelley's poetry is sensuous in its 
language — that is Shelley as a rule does 
not by a single felicitous epithet, phrase, or 
verse set a concrete object or an abstract 
quality vividly before the mind's eye. Shel- 
ley needs a mass of words to produce his 
effects — hence the haziness of his descrip- 
tions, which nevertheless have at times just 
79 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

the beauty that haziness in the natural world 
generally gives. Hence it comes that Shelley 
loves to give us clouds and sunsets and im- 
possible landscapes, hence it is that few great 
painters have ever, to my knowledge, been 
inspired by him, and hence it is, that compara- 
tively few quotations from his poems are fa- 
miliar to ordinary readers. Even a eulogist 
like Mr. John Addington Symonds has to 
admit this, although he does not give the 
reason for it, when he quotes Shelley's famous 
lines from Julian and Maddalo, 

" Most wretched men 
Are cradled into poetry by wrong, 
They learn in suffering what they teach in song." 

Even here, it is interesting to note, Shelley 
is nothing if not autobiographic. 

But finally, to return to Milton's dictum, 
Alastor and the rest of Shelley's poems are 
impassioned, yet only in the lowest sense of 
the word. Shelley's was the passion of weak- 
ness but not the passion of strength. Here 
is the true cause of his essential inferiority to 
Byron; here is the reason, as Mr. Richard 
Holt Hutton well showed, why Shelley's poe- 
try is not sublime. There is no sublimity with- 
out power and Shelley's power was only the 
pseudo-power which morbid and introspec- 
80 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

tive people can discover in weakness. We 
do speak, it is true, of sublime patience and 
the like, but the collocation of terms is an 
unfortunate one except in those cases when 
there is involved with the patience the power 
of acting effectually if the sufferer choose. 
In other words, it is difficult not to agree 
with Mr. Hutton that there can be no sublim- 
ity without power, and it is clear that the 
power that accompanies patience is rarely 
the positive power of action but only the 
negative power of restraint. But all Shelley's 
ideals were passive — he even preached pas- 
sive revolutions — hence his poetry is not 
truly impassioned, it does not flow from a 
powerful nature or affect other natures power- 
fully — that is, it tends to excite sentiment 
rather than to incite to action. 

The above criticism of Alastor applies 
as well to the beautiful poem known both as 
Laon and Cythna and as The Revolt of 
Islam. Most people tire of this poem, be- 
cause of its impossible, misty and rather 
wearisome plot. Even professed Shelleyans 
share this feeling, and while pointing out the 
beauty of a few detached passages frankly 
admit that Shelley had no qualifications for 
the role of a narrative poet. We need qualify 
this judgment only by saying that in all 
6 8i 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

likelihood Laon and Cythna is the most 
continuous stream of exquisite and delicate 
melody ever poured upon the ears of the 
world since Spenser left the Faerie Queene 
iinfinished. Of its kind I know nothing Hke 
it in any language — but its kind I must con- 
fess is musical, not poetical. As poetry it is 
as full of flaws as any poem of a real genius 
ever was, as music, as a song without con- 
crete meaning, it is simply wonderful. It 
may be remarked that in the 34th stanza of the 
I ith canto of this poem we find one of the few 
examples of a truly felicitous, a naturally 
magical epithet used by Shelley. Such an 
epithet is so rare that it must be quoted, with 
the caution, however, that it perhaps con- 
taifis a reminiscence of Dr. Donne. 

" Thus Cythna taught 
Even in the visions of her eloquent sleep." 

No other adjective could well equal the 
one which Shelley has here used ; in other 
words it is inevitable, i. e.y truly poetic. But, 
if it is seldom that one can quote such a 
perfect epithet from Shelley, it is not difficult 
to quote many a stanza to prove his perfect 
melodiousness. Here is one. 

" She moved upon this earth a shape of brightness, 
A power, that from its objects scarcely drew 
82 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

One impulse of her being — in her lightness 
Most like some radiant cloud of morning dew, 
Which wanders thro' the waste air's pathless blue, 
To nourish some far desert : she did seem 
Like the bright shade of some immortal dream 
Which walks, when tempest sleeps, the wave of life's 
dark stream." 



As poetry this is feeble because there is 
scarcely a word that clinches the object it is 
intended to represent or describe, but as 
music it is little less than divine. 

Passing over Rosalind and Helen with 
the remark that it is feeble as a whole, and 
less good in its parts than Shelley's poems are 
wont to be, we reach the celebrated Lines 
Written among the Euganean Hills. These 
I Hke better than Mr. Arnold did, although 
I recognize that they are far less artistic than 
Keats would have made them. I recognize 
also Shelley's indebtedness to Milton and 
perhaps to Dyer. But I must plead that 
the apostrophe to Venice has a combination 
of epic and lyric grandeur that is rarely sur- 
passed and that deserves a grateful remem- 
brance. One may note, however, that both 
in this poem and in the famous Hymn to 
Intellectual Beauty which follows it, there 
is that note of despairing weakness which is 
so characteristic of Shelley. 
S3 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

Going for a moment past The Cenci, we 
come to what is considered by many of his 
critics to be Shelley's most important work 
— Prometheus Unbound. The language 
that has been applied to this lyrical drama 
would certainly not be too weak in connec- 
tion with The Tempest of Shakspere or the 
Comus of Milton. Mr. Sharp speaks of 
" The wonderful melodies, the splendid har- 
monies, all the music and magnificence of 
Shelley's greatest production." Mr. Rossetti 
is still more enthusiastic when he grows 
eloquent over " The immense scale and 
boundless scope of the conception; the 
marble majesty and extra-mundane passions 
of the personages; the subHmity of ethical 
aspiration, the radiance of ideal and poetic 
beauty which saturates every phase of the 
subject, and almost (as it were) wraps it from 
sight at times, and transforms it out of sense 
into spirit; the rolling river of great sound 
and lyrical rapture " — and so forth. Mr. J. 
A. Symonds went so far as to declare that 
" a genuine liking for * Prometheus Un- 
bound ' may be reckoned the touchstone of 
a man's capacity for understanding lyric 
poetry." On the other hand it is to be 
observed that the only passage of Shelley, so 
far as I remember, that Matthew Arnold 
84 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

undertook to condemn specifically came 
from the Prometheus Unbound and that it 
would be rash to maintain that a poet who 
had written such lyrics as Arnold was not 
capable of understanding lyric poetry. 

The truth seems to me to lie very far this 
side of the unbounded praise that has just 
been recorded. Not that there is not some 
foundation for this praise, but that it is 
plainly extravagant. It strikes what Arnold 
calls somewhere the note of provinciality, the 
note of shrill assertion that that which we 
like is perfect and that whoever does not like 
it is a fool. I shall not at all quarrel with 
Mr. Sharp's *' wonderful melodies " and 
" splendid harmonies," for they surely exist 
in the poem ; but I should like to point out 
that not only does the poet's love for singing 
songs without sense often mar his work, but 
that his facility of utterance often tempts him 
to strike what is clearly a false note, as 
for example the lines quoted by Arnold 
beginning : 

" On the brink of the night and the morning." 
or what to my mind is an even worse 
instance of a thin false note, the chorus of 
spirits in the fourth act, beginning: — 

We come from the mind 
Of human kind 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

Which was late so dusk, and obscene, and blind ; 

Now 't is an ocean 

Of clear emotion, 
A heaven of serene and mighty motion. 

This is not only rendered feeble as poetry 
from its straining at concrete expression, but 
it is also rendered thin and of false quality as 
music because the rhythm does not harmon- 
ize with its content. It hardly seems ex- 
travagant to say that there are more false 
notes struck in the Prometheus than in the 
rest of Shelley's poems taken together. j 

With regard to what may be called the { 
intellectual claims put forth for this poem \ 
which has been edited for schools and been : 
made the subject of essays by the dozen, I can ! 
say only that, however true they may be when j 
applied to special passages, they are by no \ 
means true when applied to the drama as a ] 
whole. The fourth act, which is a favorite \ 
with the Shelleyans, seems to have been an i 
afterthought, and is a most lame and impo- 
tent conclusion. The characters are, except 
for short intervals, vague, misty and devoid 
of personality. The solution proposed for 
the problem of human destiny, for the freeing 
of the Promethean spirit of man is as impos- 
sible and ineffectual as if it had been gener- 
ated in the heated brain of a maniac. This 
86 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

great poem is really little more than a series of 
wonderful phantasmagoria flashed forth upon 
the curtain of the reader's mind by a very 
unsteady hand. When the reader voluntarily 
shuts off the light, i. e., ceases to think or 
judge, the effect is dazzling; when he allows 
the light of reason to play upon his mind, 
the effect is just the reverse. I admire the 
Prometheus Unbound as the daring and 
in parts splendid achievement of a briUiant, 
unbalanced, but nobly poetic nature ; but I 
cannot admit that it is worthy of language 
which would be hyperbolical in the case of 
any other poet than Shakspere or Milton. 

But to hasten on. With Prometheus 
there were published in 1820 at least four 
poems that have assuredly won immortality — 
the Ode to the West Wind, The Cloud, 
The Sensitive Plant and To a Skylark. 
Some would add to these the Ode to Lib- 
erty, but I cannot, if for no other reason, on 
account of the metrical insufficiency of its 
stanzaic form. It is needless for me to 
attempt to characterize poems which have 
seized the world's heart; but I must point 
out that to my mind Shelley is in one of 
these and in many of his other lyrics more a 
poet of the fancy than of the imagination — 
of most subtle and beautiful fancy, I admit, 
87 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

but still fancy. The Cloud, it seems to me, 
will prove the truth of this remark. Arethusa 
may also be cited in support of it. It is trite 
to say, however, that the odes To the Sky- 
lark and The West Wind display in parts 
superb imaginative power. The closing lines 
of the latter : 

" O, Wind, 
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind ? '* 

are richly imaginative; the stanza of the 
former that runs : 



" What thou art we know not ; 
What is most like thee ? 
From rainbow clouds there flow not 
Drops so bright to see 
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody," 






is richly fanciful. It is to be noted that in 
nearly all these poems, there is an undertone 
of weakness, of despair. 

Passing over Swellfoot the Tyrant with 
the remark that it is easy to agree with Mr. 
Symonds in disparaging the mass of Shelley's 
political, satirical, and avowedly humorous 
poetry, including The Masque of Anarchy, 
and that uncalled for metrical fungus Peter 
Bell, the Third, we come to the famous 
Epipsychidion, which may be likened to 
88 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

the sacred dimly-lighted shrine, in which the 
ritualistic votary of the high-Shelley-church 
party worships with the greatest unction, 
leaving the profane and uninitiated herd of 
Shelleyans to carry on their devotions in the 
more spacious and lofty cathedral of the 
Prometheus Unbound. I have already re- 
ferred to this poem as occasioned by Shel- 
ley's sudden and soon abandoned passion 
for Emilia Viviani, and I have pointed out 
the painful deficiencies of the production 
from the point of view of morals. I fully 
agree with those critics, however, who see in 
it a wonderful intensity, a white heat of pas- 
sion. But I have seen intense heat in a burn- 
ing pile of decayed leaves, and I am not 
certain that the heat of this poem does not 
remind me more of burning leaves than of 
an ever burning sun. Shakspere's sonnets 
show passion at its intensity, but their heat is 
like the heat of a burning sun. Yet the 
description of the isle to which the poet urges 
his new found love to fly with him is, if un- 
earthly, nevertheless the most wonderful 
thing of its kind that one need ever expect 
to read — exquisite fancy and a perfect sense 
for melody were never so thoroughly fused 
and ignited by emotion as in this passage. 
As for Adonais, who would touch that 

89 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

most melodious of elegies with a rough hand ? 
Certainly its subject matter is sound even if 
unsubstantiality be a characteristic of its 
author's treatment. Certainly it has the 
natural magic of sound to perfection, if not 
that of language. Certainly it will live to 
couple together forever the names of two 
noble poets. But just as certainly it has not 
the sure, the inevitable touch of the master 
hand upon it, the touch that Milton's hand 
gave to Lycidas. Hellas, too, who would 
wish to be ruthless with, even if many pro- 
fessed Shelleyans do speak of it with little 
rapture? The fragments of its prologue are 
wonderful and far sounder, far saner, far more 
powerful, and therefore nearer to the sublime, 
than anything in Prometheus Unbound. Of 
course, we all know that Shelley's energy 
gave out and that Hellas remained a frag- 
ment — a noble fragment, however, contain- 
ing the most satisfying of all the poet's 
numerous choruses : the chorus that contains 
such a stanza as this : — 

" Another Hellas rears its mountains 
From waves serener far ; 
A new Peneus rolls his fountains 
Against the morning star. 
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep 
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep." 
90 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

How much truer, how much more satisfying 
is this than the love-making of the earth 
and the moon in the vaunted fourth act of 
Prometheus? 

Putting aside Julian and Maddalo, a 
poem of the Rosalind and Helen, order, 
only more successful, the fragmentary Prince 
Athanase, the impossible but superb metrical 
freak of The Witch of Atlas, and the 
charming Letter to Maria Gisborne, which 
shows what Shelley with his delicate fancy 
could have done in the delightful realm of 
society verse, we come full upon the mass of 
fragments and short lyrics which in my judg- 
ment represent Shelley's chief contribution to 
literature. But before discussing these, I 
must say a few words about that remarkable 
drama The Cenci. 

I call it remarkable because it is perhaps, 
the most completely objective piece of work 
ever done by a subjective poet. Shelley saw 
plainly that he must efface himself, if he 
would succeed as a dramatist, and he did it 
most effectually. But something more than 
the effacement of one's subjectivity in the 
construction of a drama is necessary to its 
success. Shelley did not efface himself in his 
choice of theme, possibly no dramatist can 
— and not being a sound, wholesome charac- 
91 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

ter, he failed to choose a sound, wholesome 
theme. But Ford and Webster and Massinger 
chose unwholesome themes and succeeded. 
This was because they were greater dramatists 
than Shelley, because they had their genius 
more under control, because they knew human 
nature better. Not a single character in 
Shelley's play is a real human being, except 
Beatrice, and she lacks the charm which a 
greater artist would have given her, in order to 
counteract the horror with which her environ- 
ment and her actions invest her. Beatrice is 
strong and noble, but she is hardly flesh and 
blood, and I am not sure that Shelley does 
not cause her to fall in our esteem, when he 
allows her to use her power to make her un- 
fortunate accomplice eat his words in order 
that she may preserve the honor of her family. 
Remembering the poet's description or repre- 
sentation of that family, one is forced to ask 
how any honor could be left to preserve. I 
cannot pursue the subject, save to add that 
in only one or two passages, especially in the 
closing lines, do we strike a note of true 
poetry, or even of true music. But a tragedy 
without here and there a deep poetical note 
is Hke a desert without an oasis. Imagine 
the Duchess of Malfi stripped of its poetry ! 
This fact alone makes the opinion of those 
92 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

critics idle who claim that The Cenci is the 
greatest tragedy since Shakspere. I sup- 
pose they mean the age of Elizabeth, for I 
can hardly imagine a discreet person's putting 
Shelley's work beside that of Webster or 
Ford. But even if they mean this, they over- 
shoot the mark, for Otway with his Venice 
Preserved, and his Orphan has to be reck- 
oned with, to say nothing of Dryden and 
Byron. 

But now let us conclude this long, this 
much too long paper with a few words about 
Shelley's fragments and lyrics. What can 
English poetry show to equal them of their 
kind? and what is their kind? I answer 
simply — the lyric of weakness, of longing, 
of despair. We are all weak at times, we all 
have longings, we all despair, and so it is that 
Shelley's *' lyrical cries " take hold upon us, 
and fascinate us, and never leave us. Let us 
think them over and see if we have not ana- 
lyzed truly the secret of their fascination — 
the Invocation to Misery, the Woodman 
and the Nightingale, The Indian Serenade, 
Love's Philosophy, I fear thy kisses, gen- 
tle maiden. To the Moon, Time Long Past, 
the Dirge for the Year, To-night, Time, 
Music, when soft voices die, Rarely, rarely 
comest thou, Mutability, A Lament, Re- 
93 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

membrance, One word is too often pro- 
faned, Ginevra (though this is not a lyric), 
The Recollection, with its 

" Less oft is peace in Shelley's mind 
Than calm in waters seen," 

the dirge beginning " Rough wind that moan- 
est loud" — why, the very titles almost give 
one the " blues," so sad they are. Yes, here I 
think we have the secret of Shelley's power 
over us all ; but, as I remarked before, it is 
a misnomer to speak of power in this passive 
sense. Shelley is like an ^olian harp — the 
winds of his sad fate play upon him and im- 
mortal, weird, sad, and haunting melodies 
float away to us and enter our souls and 
abide there. And we love the harp — and 
some unthinkingly worship it, and who shall 
blame them? 

It is true that among these fragments and 
poems many pieces can be found that show 
real power — many that have not a trace of 
weakness or sadness ; and it is instructive to 
note that these pieces were mainly composed 
during the happy years in Italy when Shelley's 
powers were rapidly maturing. Had he been 
spared, there is no telling what he might 
not have done. I have already referred to 
the power displayed in the Prologue to Hel- 
las, and although I cannot praise the Tri- 
94 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

umph of Life, as Shelleyans are wont to do, 
I am by no means blind to the power of that. 
The Ode to Naples is to my mind a much 
more magnificent poem. One can hardly 
praise it too highly. And where is the 
beauty of joy more fully set forth than in 
the famous bridal song beginning — 

" The golden gates of sleep unbar." 

But words are weak and ineffectual when we 
deal with such fragile and delicate things; 
all one can do is to quote them, yet I have 
no space for that and they are too well- 
known. I will merely quote two stanzas of 
a not very familiar poem, as worth in my 
opinion, on account of their true ring, all 
the hazy paintings of sunsets and clouds that 
Shelley ever gave us. They occur in the 
poem addressed to Mary WoUstonecraft 
Godwin : 

" Upon my heart thy accents sweet 
Of peace and pity fell hke dew 
On flowers half dead ; thy lips did meet 
Mine tremblingly ; thy dark eyes threw 
Their soft persuasion on my brain, 
Charming away its dream of pain. 

" We are not happy, sweet ! our state 
Is strange and full of doubt and fear; 
More need of words that ills abate — 

95 



APROPOS OF SHELLEY 

Reserve or censure come not near 
Our sacred friendship, lest there be 
No solace left for thee or me." 

Here, I venture to think, there is a wholesome 
subject-matter, and a natural magic both of 
sound and of language. For Matthew Ar- 
nold, though right in the main in the criti- 
cisms he passed upon Shelley, might, one 
would think, have somewhat modified his 
famous formula. Shelley is by no means 
" ineffectual," although his elaborate work 
probably is in part. He is not a poet of sov- 
ereign and sustained endeavor like Milton 
and Spenser, he has not the moral profundity 
of Wordsworth, he has not the sure touch, 
the exquisite art of Keats, or the passion and 
the mastery of Byron, but he is the most 
musical, the most sympathetic, the most 
aspiring spirit that ever succeeded in sav- 
ing itself by means of its sylph-like wings 
from the ever greedy and onward rolling 
waves of the oblivious ocean. 



96 



Ill 

LITERATURE AND MORALS 



97 



Ill 

LITERATURE AND MORALS 



So much use has been made in recent years 
of the formula " Art for art's sake " that 
it seems almost an impertinence to drag 
it forward again for purposes of discussion. 
Yet the relations of literature to morals form 
a theme of such perennial and transcendent 
interest that nearly any critic is warranted in 
making them a basis for his lucubrations, 
and whenever these relations are in question, 
the convenient but often misapplied formula 
simply has to be reckoned with, since all 
literature that is worth considering is plainly 
the product of a specific art. 

In its most commonplace application the 
formula means merely that art does not exist 
primarily for purposes of preaching or teach- 
ing — which is a contention that will displease 
no one who has the slightest idea of what art 
is or rather what it does. The primary object 
of every art is to appeal pleasurably to the 
emotions which we denominate aesthetic, that 
is those that affect chiefly the eye and the ear 
99 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

— and as neither preaching nor teaching has 
such an appeal in view, except indirectly as 
a means to an end, it follows that art cannot 
be true to itself if it preaches or teaches of 
set purpose. Pure art, in other words, exists 
only for purposes of aesthetic gratification, 
and whenever any artistic product gives us 
gratification of another sort, it is either be- 
cause the emotions of the artist were not 
purely aesthetic or because we find it impos- 
sible to put ourselves in a condition of recep- 
tivity in which our aesthetic sensibilities are 
alone brought into play. 

It is hardly necessary to remark that there 
never has been in all probability a perfectly 
pure artistic product or a man or woman 
capable of receiving perfectly pure aesthetic 
pleasure. Our emotions, whether we act as 
creators or recipients of such pleasure, are too 
mixed for such a consummation. It is neces- 
sary to remark, however, that it by no means 
holds that pure art is per se nobler and of 
greater value to the race than mixed art, 
that is, art that appeals to mixed emotions. 
There are other emotions besides the strictly 
aesthetic, to wit the intellectual and moral, 
and the latter, which we may for convenience 
assume to include the spiritual, have long 
seemed to most men to be the noblest 

100 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

emotions humanity is capable of feeling. A 
work of art, while appealing primarily to the 
aesthetic emotions and taking its artistic as 
differentiated from its other characteristics 
from the fact that it makes this appeal, may, 
in its inevitable appeal to other emotions, so 
pleasurably affect our highest spiritual nature 
as to gain immensely in nobility through the 
very fact that it is not a pure artistic product 
but a mixed one. Examples are not want- 
ing to illustrate the truth of this contention. 
The Mona Lisa undoubtedly gives its beholder 
supreme aesthetic pleasure, but it would not 
be so great a picture as it is if it did not give 
him also the spiritual pleasure of seeking to 
establish relations of sympathy and amity 
between his own soul and that which lurks 
inscrutable in the depths of those disillusioned 
but divinely benignant eyes. In literature 
Poe's Ulalume gives us, perhaps, an ex- 
ample of the ne plus ultra of purely aesthetic 
appeal to ear and eye through its wonderful 
rhythm and its supernatural shadowing, but 
what sane critic would contend that Poe's 
weird poem is nobler than the less purely 
aesthetic Elegy Written in a Country Church- 
yard in which Gray succeeded in stirring the 
moral emotions of humanity to a degree 
rarely surpassed ? 

lOI 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

It is just here that we can put our finger on 
the most dangerous use that has yet been 
made of the formula " Art for art's sake.'* 
Critics and artists by the score have assumed 
that pure art is necessarily more to be desid- 
erated than mixed art, and have of late tended 
steadily not merely to stress technique in the 
interests of what we may call art-isolation, 
but to be suspicious of the criticism which 
concerns itself at all with the moral and in- 
tellectual aspects of art, and even to eschew 
subjects that might strongly suggest such 
criticism. Some of them go farther yet and 
maintain that as art exists primarily for the 
purpose of giving aesthetic pleasure, the 
artist should not be hampered in his choice 
of subject by any other than aesthetic con- 
siderations. As we have just seen, it is, to 
begin with, an absurd hypothesis to suppose 
that any subject can be chosen that will make 
a purely aesthetic appeal; and even if this 
were the case, it would not follow that an 
artist would be justified in throwing to the 
winds the advantages gained by choice of a 
subject furnishing high moral and aesthetic 
pleasure at one and the same time. We may 
readily grant that in choosing his subject the 
artist usually and rightly bases his choice 
upon aesthetic considerations and that in a 
1 02 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

majority of cases his selection is spontaneous 
rather than determined upon principle, but it 
rarely happens that after he has begun his 
work he remains totally unconscious of the 
moral bearings of his subject, and there are 
surely some subjects that involve important 
moral considerations the moment they sug- 
gest themselves to the mind. The painter 
who chooses to paint a repulsive woman in a 
repulsive attitude cannot claim the right to 
retort " honi soit qui mal y pense " to his 
censorious critics. We should make all due 
allowance for the unconscious element in art, 
but if we once admit that it is our duty — as 
it surely is — to order all our actions upon 
the highest plane possible to us, it follows 
that the artist who aims for purely aesthetic 
effects is, if conscious, guilty of a moral lapse, 
and, if unconscious, guilty of a grave error, 
whenever it can be shown that his work would 
possess higher value for the race were its 
subjects so chosen as to appeal also to our 
moral and intellectual emotions. We cannot 
therefore accept that extension of the famous 
formula which leads people to hold that the 
moralist and the thinker are guilty of imper- 
tinence when they ask to be represented on 
every jury of artistic awards. To pursue an 
art primarily for the purpose of preaching 
103 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

through the medium of communication it 
offers between soul and soul, is to degrade 
two noble functions of human genius; but to 
pursue an art in total oblivion of its relations 
with thought and morals is always to hamper 
and often to degrade art alone, since thought 
and morals will under all circumstances retain 
their dignity. Positing then as the basis of 
our reasoning the contention that the formula 
" Art for art's sake " does not, when properly 
interpreted, make for art-isolation, and con- 
fining ourselves hereafter in the main to a 
consideration of literary art proper, let us see 
what light can be thrown upon the relations 
borne by literature to morals by treating the 
subject from the threefold point of view of the 
relations to morals sustained by the writer, 
the reader, and the written work. 



II 



The primary object of the literary artist is 
to give expression to his aesthetic emotions in 
such a way as to communicate them to others, 
but if, as we have just seen, the literary pro- 
duct is sure to cause other emotions as well, 
and if most people read more or less pas- 
sively, we must conclude that, in the majority 
104 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

of cases at least, these other emotions were 
consciously or unconsciously imparted to the 
literary product by the artist.^ In some cases, 
however, it is obvious that the intellectual 
and moral emotions caused in us by the 
perusal of a piece of literature are mainly 
due to the fact that there are secret connec- 
tions between the centres of such emotional 
forces and the aesthetic emotions created by 
the literary product. Over these secret con- 
nections the writer has plainly no control, for 
he cannot gauge the emotional capacity of 
each several reader; he is therefore respon- 
sible only for such intellectual and moral 
stimulation as he experiences himself when 
engaged in creating his literary product, and 
this responsibility can be measured only on 
the assumption that there is an emotional 
standard fitting the normal man. It is a 
commonplace of criticism that the richer a 
writer's emotional nature is the more emo- 
tively effective his work will be, hence it fol- 
lows that if it be our duty to make the most 
of our talents, it is incumbent upon every 
literary man to develop his moral and intel- 
lectual nature to the utmost in order to make 
himself an ideal artist and thus a supreme 
power for good, provided always that he pre- 
1 See J^ost, Essay II., p. 156, note. 
10; 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

serves his artistic poise. From this point of 
view at least the relations of the writer, as of 
every other creative artist, to morals, are as 
clear as they are difficult to sustain in a 
proper manner, but they are also, as we easily 
perceive, the same that every conscientious 
man sustains, merely as man. 

It would seem that we have arrived at the 
conclusion that a great writer must be a very 
good man, but fortunately or unfortunately — 
we need not stop to determine which — such 
a conclusion is not warranted either by our 
process of reasoning or by a careful study of 
literary history. Lord Byron, to take only 
one instance, was not an exemplary man, but 
even his most aggressive modern detractors 
are hardly inept enough to deny that he was 
a great writer, although they come as near as 
they can to doing it. The cant which seems 
to be an essential component of the Anglo- 
Saxon nature, makes many of us anxious to 
establish the relation of cause and effect be- 
tween personal goodness and literary great- 
ness, but although noble names like those of 
Scott and Longfellow help us, such names as 
those of Swift and Poe prove awkward stum- 
bling-blocks. We have simply omitted to 
consider the fact that goodness has little 
meaning when used of a person unless it 
1 06 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

refers to conduct, whereas emotions, which 
are essential to artistic creation, need not 
translate themselves into conduct at all. It 
may indeed be held that really noble liter- 
ary work cannot be done by a man incapable 
of noble conduct, but the noble writer need 
not be an actually noble man. His emotions 
may exhaust themselves in his artistic crea- 
tions, and his conduct may be ignoble in the 
extreme. Then again so great is the force of 
artistic sympathy that it might be possible 
for a writer of objective literature to simulate 
or actually feel for the time being noble emo- 
tions he had observed in others but never 
felt in his proper person, just as it was possi- 
ble for Shakspere, reversing the process, to 
give us lago and Richard III. 

There is a further fact that we neglect to 
consider when we try to establish the conten- 
tion that the truly great writer must be a 
really good man. This is the fact that the 
intellectual qualities of literature while not 
vastly important in determining its value can 
by no means be overlooked. These are the 
qualities, rather than moral and aesthetic 
ones, that make writers like Swift and Pope 
such great literary figures. It is needless, 
however, to remark that intellect and good 
conduct are not causally related. 
107 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

But while we are estopped from believing 
that the literary artist must be a good man 
in order to win genuine success, it remains 
perfectly true to maintain that every moral 
and spiritual advance made by a writer in his 
conduct ought to increase the richness of his 
emotional life and thus to make him a nobler 
literary artist, provided alw^iys that his artistic 
impulse is strong enough to resist the an- 
tagonistic desire to give himself up to a life 
of spiritual contemplation or activity. The 
poetry of Tennyson and Browning is all the 
greater for their spiritual experiences; but 
that of the latter gains over that of the former 
for the reason that Browning's nature did not 
become so unbalanced as Tennyson's and 
never led him to withdraw from society and 
thus to deprive his poetry of that element of 
adaptation to the psychical needs of strug- 
gling humanity that does not always emerge 
from the polished verses of his more popular 
contemporary. It cannot be doubted that 
Byron's work need not have lost in energy, 
which is its most vital characteristic, and that 
it would have been far richer, had his spiritual 
life been led on a higher plane — on the 
plane, for example, to which his enthusiasm 
for the cause of Greek freedom was conduct- 
ing him when the fatal fever cut short the 
1 08 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

most fascinatingly brilliant career that any 
Englishman has had, perhaps, since the days 
of Drake and Raleigh. On the other hand 
the Middle Ages furnish us the example of a 
period when spiritual forces were too strong 
to allow many men to attain the artistic poise 
necessary to effective creative work ; and the 
pathetic career of the Irish novelist Gerald 
Griffin who gave up the chance of becom- 
ing an Irish Sir Walter — in order to do the 
silent work of a pious priest, as Mr. Aubrey 
de Vere has touchingly reminded us in 
his late volume of Recollections, serves to 
indicate that from the point of view of art at 
least a man's spiritual emotions and aspira- 
tions may be too intense. 

The artist who is lost to the world because 
he has devoted himself to the work of priest 
or philanthropist can cause us only a partial 
regret which maybe richly atoned for; but 
what are we to say of the artist who instead 
of rising above the spiritual level consistent 
with artistic poise falls below that required 
of all intelligent men? There surely is a 
spiritual level which the average man of 
thought and action is expected to keep under 
penalty of being censured by his fellows if he 
fall below it ; yet we are gravely told that a 
painter may paint and an author write regard- 
109 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

less of the consequences that may flow from 
his work, provided only that he satisfy the 
sesthetic demands of himself and a coterie of 
connoisseurs. A man, so we are told, may 
write a story that is not merely unspiritual 
but positively antagonistic to all that is 
regarded by normal men as spiritual, without 
rendering himself liable to reproach provided 
his style be exquisite, his powers of char- 
acterization good and his narrative faculty 
above reproach. All life is his province, and 
as the lascivious, the base, the brutal are 
elements of life, he is at liberty to make such 
use of them in his work as may please his 
artistic self. Now surely this is a bold de- 
mand to make — one that would not be made 
for any other class of mortals. We even 
demand of the successful general in time of 
war that he shall repress brutality among his 
soldiers ; but we encourage some novelists to 
glorify brutality and vulgarity whenever we 
hasten to buy their books. We stand aghast 
at the proposition that all life is the artist's 
province because we do not see at once 
where a line can well be drawn, and are yet 
certain that unless the proposition be quali- 
fied, the highest and purest features of our 
civilization may be endangered by the va- 
garies of irresponsible men of genius. But if 

IIO 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

we will only view the matter calmly, we shall 
perhaps find a way out of our dilemma with- 
out being compelled to deny that life is 
indeed the province of the artist in general 
and of the writer in particular. 

Our loophole of escape is a very simple 
one, so simple indeed that we continually fail 
to find it — so simple too that we have a 
right to blame the artist who does not make 
it plain to us. All life is the artist's province, 
but what gives life represented in art its 
value to the artist and to ourselves is what we 
may term its emotional content. The artist 
observes some phase of life emotionally and 
consciously or unconsciously transmits his 
emotions to us along with a representation of 
whatever caused them. If his emotions are 
pure, we shall be profited, under normal cir- 
cumstances, by being allowed to share them. 
We have a right to demand that all emotional 
appeals made to us shall be pure and pleas- 
urable, and we may make this demand of the 
writer or plastic artist just as legitimately as 
we may of our friends and acquaintances who 
indeed are sometimes obliged on account of 
the exigencies of life to make demands upon 
our sympathy that cannot be pleasurable to 
finite beings. Furthermore it is the duty of 
every man to obtain as pure, pleasurable, 
II I 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

even spiritual emotion as he may from his 
daily life and experience, and this duty is 
especially incumbent upon the artist on 
account of his high endowment. It is his 
duty to look upon life with pure^ spiritual 
eyes, as it were, and if he does this, his emo- 
tions connected with any manifestation of life 
will be pure and spiritual and will not lose 
this character when after having been em- 
bodied in a specific work of art they are 
transmitted to us who are brought into subtle 
relations with the latter. Hence we conclude 
that the artist may indeed take all life for his 
province but that he must also see to it that 
he represents artistically no phase of life that 
does not give him pure emotions which he 
may transmit to us. But when we feel re- 
pelled by his treatment of a special phase of 
life, what is it but a proof that, from our point 
of view at least, his emotions were not pure 
and high and that he himself was consciously 
or unconsciously below a proper spiritual 
level when he was engaged in the inception 
and completion of his artistic product. And 
when a sufficient number of cultured men feel 
thus with regard to the work of any writer, 
painter, sculptor, or musician, who shall deny 
that they have as much right to consider 
such an artist as morally delinquent as they 

112 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

have to judge any individual of their acquaint- 
ance whose conduct has shown that he has 
not maintained himself at the spiritual level 
properly to be demanded of him? We can- 
not indeed draw any hard and fast lines in 
such matters, but society would be in a bad 
way if no man could be judged save by hard 
and fast rules, that is by positive law civil or 
canonical. 

We are thus led to conclude that just as 
the artist as artist must not rise above such a 
spiritual level as will be consistent with his 
continuing to make art his life work, so he 
should not fall below such a spiritual level as 
will fit him to be a proper companion for true 
and good men in all lands and in all ages. 
Perhaps we may express these truths epi- 
grammatically by saying that the modern 
artist ought never to be an ascetic recluse, 
and ought always to be a thorough gentle- 
man. We make no greater moral demands 
upon him than we do upon other men, save 
in so far as his endowment makes him more 
responsible to his own conscience and to 
society ; but we certainly shall not, if we are 
wise, give him more license in matters moral 
and spiritual than we give other men. It is 
the constant fault of those who preach art- 
isolation that they demand license rather 
8 113 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

than liberty for the artist; but the great 
public has never really given in to their con- 
tentions, and the great public is right. 

I am aware that this may sound very phil- 
istine ; but I am quite ready to take the con- 
sequences. I cannot see how the man of 
genius can claim extraordinary privileges ; I 
see only that he labors under extraordinary 
responsibilities and that more rather than less 
in moral and spiritual matters should be 
demanded of him. This phase of our dis- 
cussion cannot, however, be regarded as 
closed until we have considered the moral 
responsibilities of the reader or recipient of 
artistic pleasure ; for if we may make de- 
mands upon the artist, he may surely make 
reciprocal demands on us. But it is only 
when we fail in our duties toward the artist 
that the charge of philistinism properly lies 
at our doors, hence my nonchalance with 
regard to the possibility of lodging such a 
charge successfully against what I have just 
been saying. It is no failure in duty toward 
the writer or painter to insist that each shall 
be a gentleman in his emotions ; it would 
rather be a failure in duty toward each not 
so to insist. 

But while it is easy to scout the imputation 
of philistinism, it is unsafe to incur the charge 
114 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

of obscurity, and it may therefore be well to 
illustrate the train of thought we have been 
pursuing. Two fruitful sources of dissension 
between the public and the world of artists 
and critics have been the representation of 
the nude in plastic art and the treatment of 
the problem of sex in fiction. There has been 
a great amount of philistinism displayed on 
the pubHc side, much of it in America, as the 
fantastic sallies of Mr. Anthony Comstock 
and the prudish mincings of certain gentle- 
men of Boston plainly show ; but this we 
shall discuss later. There has also been much 
bravado displayed by the authors and critics, 
and both parties to the controversy have in 
consequence frequently lost their tempers. 
But surely the problem is not so difficult as 
it has generally been considered, if we view 
it in the light of what may be called the 
theory of the emotional basis of art. A nude 
picture which a true artist is impelled to paint 
because of the pure aesthetic, intellectual 
and moral emotions that come to him when 
he contemplates the divine beauty of the 
human form cannot possibly cause other than 
pure, wholesome emotions in any normal 
person. When it does, the spectator who is 
offended is simply giving play to his idio- 
syncrasies, and in this connection it may be 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

proper to remark that a whole people may 
become more or less idiosyncratic when a one- 
sided movement, intellectual and spiritual, 
like Puritanism, dominates it for a long period 
of time. The English-speaking peoples are 
all more or less idiosyncratic with regard to 
this matter of the nude in art, and whenever 
any one among us is displeased by all or 
nearly all representations of the nude, it is a 
sure sign that such a person is of a nature far 
too warped for him fairly to claim to be con- 
sidered as forming part of the public that has 
the right to judge an artist. 

On the other hand it is indisputable that 
there are many representations of the nude 
which satisfy critics from the point of view of 
technique but are felt to be repulsive by 
persons who have no bias against the nude in 
art. What does this mean if not that the 
artist while revelling in true aesthetic emotions 
during the creation of his work, was also 
dominated more or less by emotions the 
reverse of moral or spiritual — emotions 
which were transferred to canvas or marble 
and thence to the spectator with the result of 
disturbing the latter's spiritual balance and 
causing him disquietude in proportion to his 
purity of soul? It is no escape from this 
conclusion to point to the art devotees who 
Ii6 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

profess to enjoy the picture or statue free 
from disturbing qualms. These people render 
themselves unfit judges through the very fact 
that in posing as judges they have tended to 
stress one set of emotions, the purely aesthetic, 
as those which alone are to be taken into ac- 
count by critics of the plastic arts. Having wil- 
fully blinded themselves to the intellectual and 
moral aspects of art, they quite naturally go 
into ecstasies over the most ambitious picture 
in the new portion of the Luxembourg, and fail 
to understand how a spectator who has stood 
in adoration before Titian's glorious recum- 
bent Venuses in the Tribune of the Uffizi 
should feel uncomfortable in the presence 
of the powerful but coarse canvas of the 
Frenchman. This phenomenon of criticism 
is of too frequent occurrence to be dismissed 
with a trite " honi soit" or a commonplace 
about the necessity for technical training, or 
a shrug of the critical shoulders ; it does not 
admit of being explained by the imputation 
of Philistinism or of being passed lightly over 
with a careless " de gustibus non est dispu- 
tandum." It is an important phenomenon 
that challenges attention and that is plainly 
explicable in the light of the theory of the 
emotional basis of all art. 

The same reasoning holds with regard to 
117 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

the treatment of the problem of sex. The 
novelist has a clear right to use this as an 
element of his story, provided only that he 
treat it as a gentleman should. The idea 
that the novel must be made suitable to a 
school'girl is too ludicrous to warrant dis- 
cussion, but the idea that the novel must 
answer the requirements of pure-minded men 
and women is one that should be present to 
every writer of fiction. It will not do for one 
instant to say that a novelist may be so 
interested in his characters and situations that 
he may depict them in any way that does not 
violate the canons of artistic probability. It 
is incumbent upon him to view life as a pure- 
minded, clean-hearted man of genius. This 
point of view attained, his emotions will in- 
evitably be fit for translation into an artistic 
product that will offend no normal reader 
whose idiosyncrasies are held under control. 
It goes without saying that in respect of 
idiosyncrasies we English-speaking peoples 
are less fortunate than the French. We could 
produce a Scott, — but it will be many a long 
year before we have our Balzac. On the 
other hand it cannot be denied that the French 
have been too lax in the control they have put 
upon their novelists. 

They have not demanded pure emotions 
ii8 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

and pure work from their writers of fiction, 
and thus have rarely obtained the latter except 
when, as in the case of Balzac, the noble 
character of the novelist was the safeguard of 
his literary creations. We may leave this 
phase of the subject with the remark that 
Mr. Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles is 
an excellent novel to be used as a test of the 
truth of our contentions. This great book 
was subjected to a hue and cry on the part of 
squeamish readers both in this country and 
in England, but it arrested and held the 
attention of the judicious through the fact 
that the novelist's emotions were strong and 
pure whatever one may say of the strictly 
intellectual appeal of his strenuous story, or 
of its utilitarian value as a plea. 

It now remains to make one important 
qualification with reference to all that has 
been said — a qualification that will lead us 
easily to the next stage of our discussion, 
the relations to morals sustained by the 
reader. 

The terms " moral " and '' spiritual " as we 
have continually applied them, must be taken 
in their most general sense if they are to have 
any meaning or value. To say that a writer 
must be capable of spiritual emotions is not 
to say that these emotions can be labelled 
119 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

specifically as Christian, or Mohammedan, or 
Buddhist. They will be emotions that enter 
into the warp and woof of every religious life, 
but they will be emotions that Marcus Aure- 
lius and Epictetus felt just as truly and per- 
haps as profoundly as St. Augustine and St. 
Bernard. The reason for this is found in the 
fact that it is of the essence of art that it 
should aim at a universal appeal, and it is 
enabled to make this appeal only through the 
fact that it interprets universal life in connec- 
tion with universal emotions — that is, with 
emotions shared by all normal men. It 
would be as much a profanation for the 
artist, who is the apostle of beauty, con- 
sciously to limit his appeal, as it would be 
for the scientist, who is the apostle of truth, 
or for the priest, who is the apostle of right- 
eousness. It goes without saying that as we 
have produced, in letters at least, only two 
universal artists, Homer and Shakspere, artists 
as a class have not been any more faithful to 
their ideals than have the various peoples to 
whom they have appealed, and that it is 
therefore admissible to speak of pagan and 
Christian art and to discuss the spiritual 
qualities of the work of the respective classes 
of artists in terms of the specific religion that 
dominated them. It goes without saying too 
1 20 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

that the more completely the world accepts 
Christian teachings in one form or another the 
more completely will the terms " moral " and 
" spiritual " as they have been used in this 
discussion be synonymous with the term 
" christian " when it is applied to the emo- 
tions. At present, however, we cannot fault 
an artist if his morals and his spirituality have 
reached the stage common to good men in 
every clime and of every religious faith. We 
may, however, find it natural to be more 
closely drawn to those artists whose emotions 
are " spiritual " in our own more intimate 
sense of the term. There cannot, however, 
be the least excuse for a sectarian interpreta- 
tion of the term '' spiritual." Christianity is 
catholic in its aspirations and hence the 
phrase " Christian art " is not a misnomer ; 
but a sectarian or even a puritan art would be 
things to smile at, could they ever exist. 
John Milton was a great artist, not because 
he was a puritan, but partly in spite of it. 
It is well to note, however, that while the 
artistic spirit is distracted by dissent, it is 
smothered by intolerance. 



121 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 



III 



The relations sustained to morals by the 
reader or by the recipient of aesthetic pleasure 
in general may be considered from the three- 
fold point of view of his duty to the writer or 
artist, to himself, and to his fellow men at 
large. 

It may fairly be said that very few readers 
pay any attention to the first duty. They 
are forever thinking of what a writer owes 
them, but seldom of their reciprocal obliga- 
tions. Yet it is plain that these obligations 
exist. It is clear that as a writer's fame and 
a large part of his happiness in this life 
depend upon the success of his writings, it is 
the duty of all his readers to censure him 
only when they are very sure that they have 
just grounds for so doing. Irresponsible, 
uninformed censorious criticism is morally 
wrong; according to the phrase of Milton it 
partakes of the nature of spiritual murder. 
Uninformed enthusiastic praise is also in real- 
ity unjust to the writer and is certainly unfair 
to one's fellow men — but this may be passed 
over as venial. Yet our duty to the writer 
does not stop here, for we have the posi- 
tive duty incumbent on us of endeavoring, so 

122 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

far as may be consistent with our other 
duties in life, to master the general principles 
of criticism, of reading the current books that 
the best critics recommend to us, and of try- 
ing so to fit ourselves aesthetically, intellec- 
tually, and morally that any good writer can 
make a friend of us when we read his books. 
This is the golden rule of reading — and it is 
true, of course, with regard to our attitudes 
toward all the arts — that we should try to 
make ourselves the kind of readers we should 
like to have if we were authors. This does 
not mean that we should not read for mere 
recreation, or that the art of literature or any 
other of the arts should cease to give us 
pleasure and should yield us only solid bene- 
fits ; it merely means that in justice to our- 
selves and to our fellow men who try to please 
us, we ought to put ourselves into very much 
such relations with artists as we should sus- 
tain with our fellow men in general society. 
It is our duty to perfect our manners in 
order to fit ourselves for our social functions ; 
it is similarly our duty, although not so 
paramount a one, to perfect our judgments 
and tastes in order to meet half way the 
artists who seek to minister to our aesthetic 
pleasures. 

There is much in what has just been said 
123 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

that relates to the duty of the reader to him- 
self. He owes it to himself to do all in his 
power to put himself into a proper attitude 
toward the art of literature, simply because it 
is his duty to try to develop all the faculties 
that God has given him. Unfortunately such 
self-training is irksome to most people and 
thus defeats its own ends; but we may be 
sure that if we had perfectly balanced souls 
every step made in the right direction would 
be pleasurable in itself and would lead to joys 
ineffable. As it is we are at least under some 
obHgation with regard to the development of 
our critical faculties; for literature and the 
arts have their place in every system of 
liberal education, and we all acknowledge 
that it is our duty to educate ourselves as 
well as we can. Hitherto the part played by 
art in education of a formal character has 
been so small that we have ignored our 
responsibilities in the matter; and the fact 
that the critics have insisted upon pleasure as 
the end and purpose of art has contributed 
to the same result. The idea that there is 
a duty attaching to something that minis- 
ters to our pleasures is one that few of us can 
grasp. 

Yet if an art ministers to our spiritual 
needs — and all true art does — is it not our 
124 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

duty to fit ourselves to appreciate it, and 
does not appreciation widen and deepen with 
the training and development of our critical 
faculties? There can be only one answer to 
these questions and this answer forces us to 
acknowledge that the principles of criticism 
have authority over us all. But what this 
authority is in kind and degree is and has 
been for ages a subject of dispute among 
critics themselves and to investigate the prob- 
lem in this connection would carry us far 
beyond the limits of an essay. Besides, I 
have already discussed the matter to the best 
of my ability elsewhere in this volume, and it 
must therefore suffice us here merely to in- 
sist that in the interests of self-development 
the reader must sooner or later submit him- 
self to some sort of critical training and that 
if we do not at present regard the failure to 
do this as a moral lapse, it is because we 
have not yet thought the matter out in all its 
details, and because we are not yet moral 
enough as a race in the larger particulars to 
be able to consider seriously our deficiencies 
in the smaller particulars. 

It is obvious that the duties of the reader 

toward his fellow men in general cannot be 

thoroughly separated from his duties toward 

the writer and toward himself. For example 

125 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

he owes it to an author who has charmed 
him, to acknowledge his debt of gratitude; 
but he owes this equally to his fellow men. 
One of the most delightful features of sympa- 
thetic criticism is its missionary quality. We 
cannot rest until we have expatiated to our 
friends upon the merits of each fascinating 
book we read, and it is not only our privilege 
thus to communicate our feelings but our 
duty. Yet here as in all missionary work our 
responsibilities are great and the need of sub- 
mitting ourselves to the authority of criticism 
is plain. We have no right to praise unad- 
visedly a book or picture. We think that our 
individual opinion counts for little, and so it 
does, but just as in politics we have no right 
to plead our personal insignificance when we 
vote carelessly or not at all, so in literary and 
artistic matters we have no right to forget that 
our individual opinion helps to mould other 
opinions and thus to form the popular verdict. 
Books become the " book of the hour" more 
through the gossip of the club and parlor 
than through the praise accorded them by 
responsible critical journals. It was gossip 
that spread the contagion of Trilby. 

But, some one will exclaim, this is refining 
and splitting hairs with a vengeance. Life 
would not be worth living if one had to nveigh 
126 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

one's praise of a book, a picture, even a 
magazine article as carefully as one weighs 
one's words when serving as a witness in an 
important trial. If a code of artistic ethics 
like this is to be fastened upon us, the old 
maxim '* Life is short, but art is long " would 
run for most of us " Life is short, and art is a 
nuisance." 

If there is any justice in this supposed ex- 
postulation it lies in the fact that much of 
what has been said belongs to those " counsels 
of perfection" that often seem to be counsels 
of impertinence when we consider how full 
life is of large moral demands that we cannot 
satisfy with all our striving and all our prayers. 
But surely the race would lose ground daily 
if preachers and teachers and critics and 
philosophers ceased for one moment to 
shower " counsels of perfection " upon us. 
What would Christianity — much more any 
other religion — become if it were stripped 
of such counsels? We may, indeed, make 
allowances for ourselves and others in all such 
subtle, scarcely perceptible matters of duty, 
but we must not the less insist that the sphere 
of duty is all embracing, that we cannot 
escape from moral obligations anywhere in 
this world of ours — not even in the Vatican 
itself when we stand gazing at one of Raphael's 
127 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

frescoes; for even there our admiration must 
be mixed with gratitude. Would that all 
duties were so pleasant ! 

But if we consent to excuse the average 
reader from being held to strict account with 
regard to our " counsels of perfection," we 
should make no excuse for readers who are 
clothed with any sort of authority. Even 
clergymen and lawyers, who are not especially 
concerned in literature and art, should take 
care how they pass judgment upon this book 
and that picture, simply because they are 
generally looked up to in every community. 
The teacher — and especially the teacher of 
literature — occupies a still more responsible 
position. He forms the mind of youth, and 
a mere careless word in praise of a book of 
dubious morality may suffice to give a down- 
ward thrust to some young life. His habits 
of reading, his general attitude toward art are 
of immense importance in every college com- 
munity, and indirectly in the world at large. 
It would be hard to estimate the harm that 
has been done to the young men of this 
country through the discovery they must 
have been making of late that most of their 
teachers are specialists — knowing only one 
class of books and caring little for literature 
and art in their widest application. It would 
128 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

be hard also to estimate the harm done by 
injudicious methods of presenting the most 
fascinating subjects that have fallen to the lot 
of man to teach. But in all these matters 
there is hope ahead. 

We may conclude this branch of our 
discussion by remarking that there is one 
great moral obligation resting upon the 
reader that may be considered in general 
without reference to our threefold division. 
It has already been referred to. No reader 
has a right to expect that an author or an 
artist shall consult his individual idiosyncra- 
sies, or even his preferences in religious, 
social, and political matters. We can appre- 
ciate a universal art only by cultivating 
catholicity of spirit. If indeed our mind is 
made up on this or that important matter, it 
will follow naturally that the writer or artist 
who runs counter to our convictions will 
forfeit that portion of success which is depen- 
dent upon his power to give us strictly intel- 
lectual pleasure; but if his work of art is 
great from the point of view of aesthetics and 
if it yields us the moral pleasure that attaches 
to what is good in the widest sense, it is a 
sign of mental inflexibility in us if we fail to 
receive enjoyment. We simply have no right 
to let our minds harden to such an extent 
9 129 



UTERATURE AND MORALS 

that they cannot play freely around any work 
of literary or plastic art. All purely utili- 
tarian demands made upon writers and 
artists, demands that they shall teach thus 
and so, that their works shall support our 
theories — are due to this mental induration 
from which not one of us escapes. Mr. 
Hardy's Tess has encountered many such ad- 
amantine minds in its short voyage. Whole 
classes of books sometimes share this fate 
most undeservedly — as for example the 
coarse but splendidly powerful novels pro- 
duced in the last century — particularly those 
of Fielding. Coarseness and immorality so 
often go hand in hand that many of us cannot 
distinguish between them, and our power of 
isolating ourselves from our own time and 
civilization is so feeble that our minds cannot 
play around these books and we express the 
lurid wish of the late Mr. Sidney Lanier, that 
they may all be burned instanter. The fact 
is that Fielding's Tom Jones is probably 
the greatest English novel and that its loss 
would be a calamity. If, however, experience 
has proved to us that such books are not good 
for us, any more than they are for very young 
minds, it is of course our duty to pass them 
by. But there is no excuse for our blinking 
the fact that our minds are indurated or for 
130 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

our setting ourselves up as ultra-pure literary 
prohibitionists — that is as Pharisees. 



IV 

It is clear that nearly everything that has 
been hitherto said could be made applicable, 
by means of a few turns of phrase, to our 
discussion of the relations between the writ- 
ten work and morals in general. It is clear 
also that the subject might be treated in- 
definitely; I shall therefore confine myself to 
one phase of it, to wit, the question how far 
the moral element in literature seems to have 
affected the race in its determination of the 
books it is willing to rank as classics. If any 
important facts can be obtained with regard 
to the relations of the classics to morals, it 
will be far easier to draw inferences with 
regard to the relations that ought to subsist 
between morals and general literature than it 
would be to draw such inferences from purely 
abstract considerations based on the nature 
of literature or from a discussion of contem- 
porary phases of literary art. These infer- 
ences will not, however, be drawn here, for 
to draw them would be to protract this essay 
to a really intolerable length. 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

The first fact that strikes us in considering 
the classics from our present point of view is 
that if we take the absolutely supreme master- 
pieces of the nations, they are all not merely 
not immoral, but profoundly and positively 
moral. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the odes 
of Pindar and the dramas of Sophocles, the 
-^neid, the Divine Comedy, the plays of 
Shakspere, the Don Quixote, the greatest 
plays of Corneille, Moliere, and Racine, the 
Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, the Comedie 
Humaine, and the Legende des Siecles — all 
these noble works of genius would be abso- 
lutely changed and clearly weakened if we 
could take from them their capacity to stir 
our moral emotions. Now could this capa- 
city have existed to such an extent in these 
masterpieces if their authors had not felt 
emotions similar to those we experience? It 
is hard to believe that it could ; and it is 
equally hard to believe that the capability to 
feel and excite such emotions is not as neces- 
sary to a supreme author's success as the 
more strictly artistic capacity to feel aesthetic 
emotions and give vent to them by means of 
infinitely varied rhythm and euphony, and 
command over the emotional elements of 
language. The possession and use of the 
grand style mark off Homer and Dante, 
132 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

Shakspere and Milton from the mass of 
poets, but, as Matthew Arnold was never tired 
of telling us, a '' high seriousness " marks them 
off as well. I am not going to try to defend 
Mr. Arnold's description of poetry as a " criti- 
cism of hfe" or to take up cudgels in his 
behalf against the many critics and readers 
who think that he sometimes mixed disas- 
trously his r61es of critic and moralist ; but I 
will say that I think the whole English speak- 
ing world owes him a debt of gratitude for 
his insistence upon the fact that all really 
great literature is profoundly moral in tone. 
It is scarcely necessary to remark that this 
does not mean that the supreme authors 
preach to us or that great literature is obtru- 
sively moral or spiritual — outside, of course, 
of specifically sacred and spiritual books — 
but it does mean that all of the works belong- 
ing to the highest range of the world's classics 
have their underlying moral basis, just as 
they have their intellectual basis, and their 
aesthetic basis. 

It is to be observed further that all these 
works are not merely those that the critics 
have agreed to rank as supreme, but they are 
those that the public at large among the 
respective races and nations that have given 
them birth have accepted and treated as 
133 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

supreme. The greatest masterpieces of Greek 
literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were also 
the most popular, and the same is true of 
the works of Virgil, Dante, Shakspere and 
Goethe. The Latin race which we are accus- 
tomed to regard as not profoundly moral, is 
in this respect at one with the more sober 
Teutonic race. The inference is irresistible 
that no writer can attain the position of a 
world classic who is not as much an uncon- 
scious moralist as he is a conscious or uncon- 
scious artist. 

Nor is the case altered when we come to 
consider the great literary men who are 
either not entitled to rank as supreme classics 
anywhere or else rank as such only in their 
own country. Chaucer is an example of the 
latter class — supreme in English poetry after 
Shakspere and Milton, he is yet not a world 
classic. Mr. Arnold has said that this is due 
to the fact that Chaucer has not sufficient 
seriousness, and largeness of view. I am 
inclined to doubt this and to wonder whether 
Chaucer may not in the more cosmopolitan 
future attain the rank of a world classic, for it 
seems to me that he is deeply moral and 
truly serious under his playful smiles. Be 
this as it may, Chaucer, even in tales that are 
Coarse to our present notions, is always whole- 
134 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

some and moral and so illustrates the truth 
of our contention. Spenser with his exquisite 
purity, illustrates it even better, and so do 
Gray and Burns. Wordsworth illustrates it, 
but at the same time shows us that mere 
seriousness unaccompanied by a continuously 
great style will not suffice to attain true 
popularity. Tennyson illustrates admirably 
how a writer who combines moral seriousness 
and artistic excellence may attain the sum- 
mit of contemporary renown. Shelley on the 
other hand shows us how the possession of 
exquisite artistic gifts and the warm worship 
of a zealous body of admirers will not make 
any writer truly popular if his subject matter 
be not entirely sound. Even Keats himself 
is still suffering from the fact that Death did 
not give him time to ripen the moral side of 
his nature; and Byron is naturally suffering 
still more from the same cause. But all these 
men are true classics because their work, 
either in whole or in part, will stand the 
moral test and because it can obviously stand 
the aesthetic and intellectual tests. Byron 
indeed has come perilously near falling from 
the position due to his transcendent genius — 
there are not wanting people to tell us that 
he actually has fallen— but here again I find 
myself by Mr. Arnold's side contending that 
135 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

a large part of his work is sound and that his 
energy, his sincerity, his humor, his range of 
intellect and feelings — make him the great 
literary power that the continental nations 
still believe him to be. 

I have included in the above list of writers 
none but Englishmen and poets, but I believe 
that the contention made can easily be estab- 
lished with regard to secondary prose classics 
in England and with regard to secondary 
classics generally in the great European liter- 
atures. It must be remembered, of course, 
that as the intellect plays a considerable 
part in all literature even in poetry, certain 
writers have attained positions as classics 
chiefly through the intellectual side of their 
works. These men are all secondary classics, 
however, and the moral element is never 
lacking from their writings, for it is almost 
impossible to use the intellect in a way that 
will tell materially upon future generations 
unless it is used on the side of morals. Pope 
and Boileau will serve to illustrate the truth 
of this statement. 

The proposition that the supreme and 
secondary classics of the various nations are 
on the whole distinctly moral will not, in the 
natural order of things, escape contradiction. 
A notorious educator has lately discovered 
1^.6 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

that Virgil is not a safe author for schoolboys 
to read, and Mr. Sidney Lanier's views with 
regard to the morality of Fielding and Smol- 
lett have just been referred to. I can imagine 
quite an army of worthy citizens of the type 
of Mr. Comstock brandishing a host of books 
at me if I were once to get in their midst and 
they were at all widely read. Horace and 
Rabelais and Boccaccio and Margaret of 
Navarre would shudder to behold their works 
used as missiles, and Shakspere would be 
almost the only Elizabethan dramatist who 
could look on serenely. As to the French 
novelists, their only consolation would lie in 
the fact that their loosely stitched volumes 
would come to pieces so easily as to be in- 
effective in offensive warfare. But although 
I might be smothered in paper I should die 
exclaiming that coarseness is not and never 
has been synonymous with immorality and 
that no really immoral author has ever won 
the suffrages either of the majority of his 
contemporaries or of posterity. 

This contention has, to be sure, been made 
thousands of times ere this, and it will doubt- 
less be made thousands of times hereafter; 
but it none the less needs making everywhere 
and always. It is the emotions of the author 
and the reader that determine the moral 
137 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

character of a book, and whenever the author 
has been pure in the main, as has been the 
case with the truly classical writers, a pure- 
minded reader of mature years and no special 
idiosyncrasies will find little or nothing to fault 
in the morals of the literary work in question. 
This is true no matter what characters and 
situations may be found in the book — if it be- 
long to the drama or fiction — or what ma- 
terial in general may be used by the writer. 
The essential point in all artistic work is the 
treatment of the materials. Improper ma- 
terials are those that cannot be treated with 
pure emotions by any normal artist, hence it 
is idle to pick out this or that incident from a 
book and declare that it makes for or against 
morality unless one can show conclusively 
that the author has so treated it that normally 
decent men have their sensibilities shocked 
by it. This I believe it will be impossible to 
do with regard to any truly classic book 
except in the particular of obscenity, which 
is not immoral per se but only by association. 
If a reader cannot tolerate obscenity he will, 
as we have already seen, do well to eschew 
certain noted books, but he should not regard 
them as necessarily immoral. Such books 
will probably lose popularity more and more 
as our tastes change and develop, and they 

138 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

may in the end be practically dropped from 
the list of the classics unless their positive 
merits suffice to keep them really alive — but 
this is a side issue on which enough has been 
said. 

The actually immoral book does not there- 
fore in my opinion stand any chance of rank- 
ing among the classics, but it is possible 
for unmoral books to attain this rank. For 
example Poe is one of the least positively 
moral and spiritual authors that I have ever 
read, but his rank as a classic is indisputable, 
although part of his comparative lack of suc- 
cess in certain portions of this country may 
perhaps be traced to the absence of a moral 
basis for his literary work. But in Poe's case 
we have a wonderful surplus of aesthetic and 
intellectual qualities to make up for the de- 
ficiency in positively moral qualities. Then 
again it must be remembered both that his 
genius moved in spheres so remote from 
" this dim spot which men call earth " that 
considerations of morality scarcely seem to 
apply to his creations, and that there is hardly 
an author to be named who so little suggests 
the actually immoral. Poe is an essentially 
pure writer, yet his purity is so cold and 
weird that we do not obtain from it the glow 
needed to excite our moral emotions. 
139 



LITERATURE AND MORALS 

But it is time to bring this essay to an end, 
and there is perhaps no better way to do this 
than to sum up briefly the main conclusions 
suggested by our analysis. We have practi- 
cally been led to believe that every truly suc- 
cessful author and artist must necessarily 
possess the emotions of a gentleman, which 
will ensure the modicum of spirituality re- 
quired. We have seen further that every 
reader should strip himself as far as possible 
of his idiosyncrasies, should meet the author 
half way, and should exercise due care in 
forming and uttering his literary opinions. 
Finally we have found reason to maintain 
that all truly classic literature has a moral 
basis, whence we conclude that if the classics 
continue to exert their due influence we need 
not fear that immoral and deleterious forms 
of literature and art can ever really flourish in 
our midst.^ 

1 Mr. Justin McCarthy in his delightful Reminiscences 
(I., 60-64) has lately given us John Bright's interesting 
theory that all bad characters should be omitted from 
novels. Perhaps they will be dropped, just as obscenity 
has been, but the consummation is a good way off. 



140 



IV 

THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 



141 



IV 



THE NATURE OF LITERA 
TURE 



From time out of mind critics have en- 
deavored without success to define Htera- 
ture. They have all been more or less able 
to describe it ; they have all been fairly well 
agreed as to many of its chief character- 
istics; they have seldom failed in the long 
run to answer satisfactorily the concrete 
question whether a certain piece of writing 
belongs or not to literature ; and yet they 
have never succeeded in discovering infal- 
lible tests by which every reader can assure 
himself of the literary or non-literary char- 
acter of any specific composition. In fact, 
they have not themselves succeeded in using 
the word " literature " with appreciable con- 
sistency. The dictionaries, which register 
public and critical usage with regard to the 
meanings of terms, give us a number of 
senses in which this particular term may be 
143 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

correctly employed. It may be equivalent 
to " learning ; " it may mean *' the use of 
letters for the promulgation of thought or 
knowledge ; " it may signify " recorded 
thought or knowledge, the aggregate of 
books and other publications, in either an 
unlimited or a hmited sense " — that is to 
say, all books, or books in a special language, 
or about a special subject, such as chem- 
istry; finally, it may express '* in a restricted 
sense the class of writings in which expres- 
sion and form in connection with ideas of 
permanent and universal interest are char- 
acteristic or essential features, as poetry, 
romance, history," etc., ** in contradistinction 
to scientific works or those written expressly 
to impart knowledge." 

The above definitions are all taken from 
the " Century Dictionary," and it will be 
seen at once that, unless they are analyzed, 
they will prove of little service to the 
thoughtful student. The first two uses of 
the term are plainly of a secondary or de- 
rived character, and need not concern us, 
while we perceive immediately that the 
third is too large to be of any real value 
to us. ** Recorded thought or knowledge " 
is a definition that will dignify with the title 
of literary men the Pharaohs, who carved 
144 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

their names on pyramids; the Roman 
Emperors, who recorded their exploits on 
triumphal arches ; the Druids, who couched 
their mysteries in oghams; the English 
monks, who set down year by year the 
forays of the Danes; together with the 
obliging dealers of the present time who 
compile catalogues of secondhand books, 
the Congressmen who distribute their own 
speeches gratis, and the statisticians, ex- 
pert or otherwise, who superintend the pub- 
lication of our decennial census. All these 
enumerated persons, together with mathe- 
maticians, chemists, physicians, lawyers, 
theologians, and the rest of the men who 
write and print with the result of merely 
adding to our knowledge, may be worthy 
of high praise, but cannot be called literary 
if that epithet is to have any appreciable 
value. The study of literature under such 
circumstances would be practically bounded 
only by the sphere of human knowledge. 
Some line of demarcation must be drawn 
if ** literature " is to be regarded as anything 
less than a purely indefinite, almost infinite, 
term. 

Such a line of demarcation has been drawn 
in the framing of the fourth definition given 
above, and it coincides obviously with that 
10 145 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

adopted by De Quincey when he wrote of 
the literature of knowledge as opposed to 
the literature of power, as well as with that 
chosen by Charles Lamb when he distin- 
guished between books that are ** no books " 
and books that are really books — which 
live and deHght their readers — the kind of 
books Milton had in mind when he wrote 
that it would be as wicked to kill a good 
book as to kill a good man. Mr. John 
Morley also gives the same idea in a slightly 
different form when he says that " literature 
consists of all the books — and they are not 
so many — where moral truth and human 
passion are touched with a certain largeness, 
severity, and attractiveness of form." 

But have we not passed from too large a 
definition of our term to one that is too 
small? Are not some of Mr. Huxley's 
essays, which he intended to make and did 
make scientific in character, regarded as 
literature by many people, and on just 
grounds? Again, are the ideas expressed 
by such a poem as Poe's Ulalume fairly 
to be described as possessing permanent and 
universal interest, or does the poem itself 
touch moral truth with any largeness of form ? 
Yet are we prepared to say that Ulalume 
is not literature, even though it is not a 
146 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

book, and is thus outside the precise terms 
of Mr. Morley's definition? 

The truth is that, while we are plainly on 
the right track when we attempt to separate 
the nobly moving and powerful books from 
those that merely convey information in a 
more or less perfunctory manner, we find it 
difficult to get a definition that will suit us, 
because we are trying to define what is really 
the product of an art, and may therefore be, 
so far as its subject-matter is concerned, 
as large as life expressed in terms of the 
medium of expression peculiar to that art 
can ever be. Now life itself is practically 
indefinable and infinite, and, as one can 
recognize almost at a glance, the medium of 
expression used by the art of literature — 
to wit, words in certain combinations — is 
practically infinite also. We are, therefore, 
trying to define a product that may assume 
as many forms almost as life — an attempt 
which is hopeless, especially when we insist 
on laying stress upon subject-matter in 
framing our definition. We simply cannot 
say that literature is in essence any particu- 
lar thing, because its subject-matter, which 
is its essence, may be everything. But we 
may perhaps find it possible to get a work- 
ing description of literature that will suffice 
M7 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

for all our purposes if we will frankly say 
that we believe that there is such a thing as 
an art of literature which expresses itself 
by means of words, much as music does 
by means of sounds, painting by means of 
an arrangement of colors on some material, 
etc. Then, without asking ourselves what 
our finished hterary product is in its essence, 
let us ask ourselves what methods of em- 
ploying words have been used by great 
writers in the past to produce work which 
the world has agreed to regard as literary 
in character. In other words, we will imitate 
the critic of music who studies to determine 
the artistic methods of the great composers 
of recent times. If we can find that there 
are certain principles of word-arrangement 
common to all works that the world has re- 
ceived as good literature, just as there are 
certain principles of sound-arrangement com- 
mon to all true music, we shall then be able 
to say with confidence that literature is the 
product of an art which deals with words in 
a certain way ; and if our " certain way " 
be not easily definable, we need not be sur- 
prised, for all art is the expression of human 
genius, which is itself indefinable, and many 
things in this life can be recognized that can- 
not be defined. 

1 48 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

It must be admitted, of course, that, in 
treating literature as the sum total of the pro- 
ducts of what we have called literary art, we 
are not improving our condition from the 
point of view of critical theory. It is much 
easier to describe any art than to define it, 
but students of painting and the other fine 
arts have usually less difficulty than students 
of literature in describing the products of 
their respective arts. This is mainly because 
they begin with certain freely conceded pos- 
tulates with regard to the nature of art in 
general. They assume that the product of any 
art must, to be legitimate, give pleasure of an 
emotional kind connected with the idea of 
beauty, although, according to some critics, 
pleasure of an intellectual kind connected 
with the idea of truth and of a moral kind 
connected with the idea of right conduct, are 
often present also, and in the greatest works 
of art are indispensable.^ They assume, fur- 
ther, that when the quality of usefulness is 
connected with a work of art, it must not 
interfere considerably with the quality of 
beauty. Making the satisfaction of the ass- 

1 Here and elsewhere I make no pretence of using psy- 
chological terms with scientific accuracy. I trust, however, 
that the tmtechnical terms employed will make my mean- 
ing sufficiently clear. 

149 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

thetic sense a sine qua non of artistic produc- 
tion, art critics are thus, on the whole, able 
to pronounce with adequate certainty on the 
question whether a given product is artistic 
or not, because they ask rather what a work 
of art does, than what it is in its essence. 
They ask also what the artist does, consciously 
or unconsciously, in order to make a work of 
art produce its legitimate pleasurable effect 
upon the aesthetic sense. Thus, as a rule, 
they continually avoid metaphysical questions 
— although these have their interest — and 
deal with more or less concrete phases of 
their subject. 

Let us now apply their methods to what we 
call literary art, and see whether we shall not 
obtain more tangible results than we should 
do were we to continue to endeavor to define 
literature. We may, indeed, find before we 
have finished that literature is a rather com- 
plex art, consisting of poetry which corre- 
sponds with music and painting and sculpture, 
in which the elements of use and often of 
moral and intellectual emotion play a de- 
cidedly inferior part to the element of aesthetic 
emotion, and prose which holds partly by the 
arts named above, and partly by architecture, 
in which the element of use enters conspicu- 
ously. The complex character of our art 
150 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

need not, however, render our method of 
treatment particularly difficult or in any way 
unserviceable, nor need the fact that intellec- 
tual and moral emotions of a pleasurable kind 
often predominate over aesthetic emotions in 
prose and, for some minds, even in poetry, 
hinder us from regarding literature as the 
product of an art, since the sine qua non of 
all art — viz., an appeal to the aesthetic sense 
— will be found to exist in all literature that 
good critics have been agreed in considering 
worthy of attention, and since the element of 
pleasure, on the part both of creator and of 
recipient, continually abides. 



II 



In pursuance of our plan of treatment let 
us now examine the following statement, 
which has resulted from a considerable analy- 
sis of the problem we have just been discuss- 
ing, and see if it will help us appreciably: 
In order to produce literature or to practise 
the art of literature a writer must record not 
merely his thought or his knowledge or both, 
but also express his sustained aesthetic, intel- 
lectual, and moral emotions in such a way as 
151 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

to awaken in a sustained manner similar 
emotions in others. 

We shall do well to explain by means of 
an example. An important historical event 
happens —a fictitious event would serve our 
purpose just as well — and a man knowing 
the facts about it writes them down. This 
man, no matter who he may be, even a me- 
diaeval monk, will probably have emotions, 
aesthetic, intellectual, and moral, connected 
with the event he records ; but unless he has 
the power, conscious or unconscious, to give 
these emotions expression in his record, what 
he writes will not be literature in any true 
sense. He will not write history, but annals of 
an unliterary kind. Yet this man, though he 
may not be capable of an original thought, 
may, nevertheless, if he has power to fuse his 
knowledge and accompanying emotions, 
produce something that is truly literary in 
character. He does not write history as yet, 
but he does write picturesque and entertain- 
ing annals. If now to knowledge and emo- 
tions he adds thought, if he traces effects to 
their causes and draws conclusions, if his 
thought be truly original and philosophical, 
he has done all that he can do in a literary 
way for the actual event, he has written his- 
tory in its highest and truest sense. If, how- 
152 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

ever, our hypothetical writer, with his 
abundant knowledge and his philosophical 
powers of thought, had been either capable 
of no emotions, an improbable supposition, 
or destitute of the power of expressing them, 
he would most certainly not have produced 
a literary work. He would, perhaps, have 
made a contribution to the philosophy of 
history, but not to history in the sense in 
which the student of literature applies that 
noble term. Furthermore, if our writer's 
emotions, or his power of expressing them, 
had been merely momentary or intermittent, 
and not fairly sustained, he would have writ- 
ten something that could not, as a whole, 
have been called literature, in spite of the fact 
that literary fragments might have been em- 
bedded in it. The same thing is true when 
several writers of varying powers join to pro- 
duce a common work, as for example the 
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which contains 
literature, but is not itself, as a whole, litera- 
ture at all. 

Finally, our would-be historian or pictur- 
esque annalist must possess not merely 
adequate knowledge, with or without original 
thought, and emotions which he can express 
so as to relieve his tension of soul ; he must 
possess also the power of so expressing his 
153 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

emotions as to make others feel them. A 
sustained and, so to speak, contagious ex- 
pression of emotion, which must be partly 
aesthetic in character, is the indispensable 
condition to every piece of writing that has 
any claims to be considered as literature, if 
literature be regarded as the product of an 
art. It sometimes happens that a man pos- 
sessing adequate knowledge, original thought, 
and vivid emotions, which are not correlated 
by that faculty, of which we shall speak here- 
after, known as the imagination, expresses 
himself in a way presumably sufficient to 
reheve his own pent-up feelings, but not in a 
way capable of appreciably communicating 
these feelings to others.^ Such a man, we 
say, lacks literary or, as some would put it, 
stylistic or imaginative capacity, and as a 
consequence his book, if it survive at all, lives 
only for special students. Under these cir- 
cumstances we are immediately led to ask 
(putting aside the consideration of those 
writers who deal chiefly with thought and 
emotion apart from external knowledge — 
that is, philosophers of a hterary turn) if there 

1 It is probably by some such reasoning that we must 
explain the existence among us of a large number of would- 
be authors who are unsuccessful in spite of many good 
qualities of mind and heart. 



1 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

is any medium of expression by the use of 
which a writer of abihty can always reUeve 
his own surcharged emotions, and at the same 
time surely communicate them to others. 

There must be such a medium of expres- 
sion, or literature in our sense of the term 
cannot exist; for, as we have seen, the sus- 
tained and contagious expression of emotion 
is what serves to distinguish the writings of 
the mere knower and thinker from those of 
the Hterary man or artist proper. We cannot 
say that the possession and use of such a 
medium of expression is the sole requisite 
of the true man of letters, for a modicum of 
thought and, in a sense, of knowledge also, 
or what we may term a " carrying statement" 
is necessary to every literary work, since the 
power of expressing emotion pure and simple 
is assigned to the other fine arts like music 
and painting, which cannot present thought 
at all, but only suggestions to thought. Yet 
it is perfectly true to say that with the posses- 
sion and use of a highly developed medium 
for the expression and communication of his 
emotions a writer can produce vital literature 
almost without thinking a tangible thought 
or recording a thing worth knowing. Poe's 
Ulalume is a striking proof of the truth of 
this statement. But it is time to endeavor to 
155 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

determine what our desiderated medium of 
expression is in its essence.^ 

1 It has been assumed throughout the above disGussion 
that the artist consciously or unconsciously communicates 
his emotions to us through the medium of his art product ; 
but this assumption will not win full assent until we exam- 
ine what is meant by a phrase constantly used by critics 
— to wit, " impersonal art." Perhaps some citations from 
Mr. Bernhard Berenson will enable us to indicate the na- 
ture of the problem. " Velasquez, who painted without 
ever betraying an emotion," is the first ; the second is 
longer and runs as follows : "If a given situation in life, 
a certain aspect of landscape, produces an impression upon 
the artist, what must he do to make us feel it as he felt it ? 
There is one thing he must not do, and that is to reproduce 
his own feeling about it. That may or may not be interest- 
ing, may or may not be artistic ; but one thing it certainly 
cannot do, it cannot produce upon us the effect of the 
original situation in life or the original aspect of the land- 
scape ; for the feeling is not the original phenomenon itself, 
but the phenomenon, to say the least, as refracted by the 
personality of the artist, and this personal feeling, being 
another thing, must needs produce another effect." (The 
Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance, pp. 70, 71.) 

We may note that there is nothing here that interferes 
with the idea that the artist experiences emotions in con- 
nection with some external phenomenon, which emotions 
he wishes us to realize. We note, further, that no ques- 
tion is raised with regard to subjective art proper, such as 
that of the lyric poet whose feeling is often the real thing 
to be described rather than the external phenomenon that 
has occasioned the feeling. The whole question is plainly 
one of method. Mr. Berenson holds that the great artist 
will strive to avoid the effects of the "personal equation," 
much as a scientist will, and in the highest ranges of objec- 
tive art this is true. The dramas of Shakspere, for exam- 

156 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 



III 

That it consists primarily of words goes 
without saying. Thought and knowledge, if 

pie, are in the main impersonal. But while it is correct, 
from one point of view, to affirm that Velasquez painted 
and Shakspere wrote without betraying an emotion, it is 
hardly correct to say that either painted or wrote without 
more or less consciously intending to communicate to 
others certain emotional states which the mere reproduc- 
tion of the external phenomenon could not be relied on to 
convey. Mere reproduction is photography, and neither 
Velasquez nor Shakspere was a photographer. Certain 
emotional states, such as those of exaltation, of admira- 
tion, of contempt, must, it would seem, actually charac- 
terize the artist while he is producing. He cannot be a 
mere lens ; he must be inspired. But when he is inspired 
he is out of himself, and hence is impersonal, although 
really in a state of exaltation which he is trying to repro- 
duce in us. He is not conscious, perhaps, of his endeavor, 
certainly not in a personal and selfish way ; but for the 
convenience of our analysis we may assume that what he 
does is actually to try to make us feel something. He 
would not paint or write if this were not his motive, yet 
he may have this motive and be as much out of himself as 
a thoroughly spiritual man is when he performs some act 
of heroic self-abnegation. But the experience of sustained 
emotions and the inspired, unselfish impulse to stir such 
emotions in others in connection with the exciting phe- 
nomenon seem to be the basal facts in all art creation ; and 
if the artist really paints or writes without betraying an 
emotion, it is because he is great enough to prevent his 
brush or pen from expressing any single characteristically 
personal emotion which he perceives would introduce a 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

they are to serve any definite purpose, 
must be presented to us in more or less con- 
disturbing element of self, a result which experience has 
told him would be dangerous ; or else it is because he is 
in that condition of creative exaltation which the Greeks 
attributed to their poets and Avhich Matthew Arnold had 
in mind when he said that it seemed as if Nature some- 
times took the pen out of Wordsworth's hand and wrote 
for him. We may rest assured, therefore, that the theory 
of the emotional basis of all art and of the communication of 
the artist's emotions to spectator or reader is not really af- 
fected by anything that can be said about the nature and 
value of impersonal art. Emotions, or at least an emotional 
state, can be communicated in an impersonal, unconscious 
way in art as well as in conduct. We may conclude this 
lengthy side discussion by a brief consideration of what 
ought to be the most impersonal of all art attitudes, if we 
may so speak : that of the portrait-painter. Here the artist 
should surely strive to reproduce the sitter in the most 
faithful way on canvas ; in other words, he ought not to 
let us suspect the existence of the "personal equation." 
But it is hard to believe that if the sitter excited a state of 
emotional contempt in the artist this contempt would not 
inevitably be communicated through the picture to the 
beholder. So a great painter having a hero to paint for 
whom he felt admiration would almost inevitably transmit 
that admiration. Friendship, indifference, every emotional 
state, seems to get itself transferred to canvas ; or else, if 
these moral emotions are absent, there are aesthetic emo- 
tions connected with movement and what the critics call 
" tactile values " which in the main occupy the artist and 
are transmitted to us. Perhaps the best portraits, techni- 
cally speaking, are those in which sesthetic emotions like 
these have dominated the artist, but it is hard for some of 
us to feel that in the case of the noble portraits by Raphael 
to be seen in the great Florentine double gallery there was 

158 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

nected wholes, and this is done among all 
civilized peoples only through the use of 
words, spoken or written. The emotions of 
the man who seeks literary utterance must, 
as we have seen, attach themselves to at least 
a modicum of thought and knowledge, to a 
carrying statement; hence these emotions, to 
have literary value, must be expressed in 
words. A series of twenty piercing cries 
would express profound emotion, but would 
not be in the least sense literary in character.^ 
Our medium, then, must consist of words 
spoken or written. But for all practical pur- 
poses literature must be something recorded, 
something preserved, that can be enjoyed and 
re-enjoyed. Before the days of writing and 
printing literature was remembered, not 
recorded; but nowadays we record, and 
do not try to remember. The spoken 
word practically perishes, therefore, and 
need not be considered as literature in any 
strict sense, since the phonograph has not 
been yet put to serious use. Hence orators 

not some strong moral emotion continually affecting the 
earnest painter as he toiled away upon his task of giving 
life to his canvases and pleasure tempered with moral awe 
to us who now behold his handiwork. 

1 Such a series might be used in a piece of literature 
with considerable effect. I have an impression that one is 
to be found in the Philoctetes. 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

whose words are not reported, which is 
naturally rare at present, are literary men who 
do not produce literature. Our medium con- 
sists, therefore, of recorded words, and nowa- 
days of written or printed words couched in 
alphabetical symbols. Literature might, of 
course, be presented in symbols other than 
alphabetical, but this fact does not affect our 
analysis. These recorded or — let us say 
hereafter — written words, as they must con- 
vey a modicum of thought and knowledge, a 
carrying statement, should be arranged ac- 
cording to the laws of syntax, and, indeed, in 
order that they may produce a uniform and 
ascertainable impression, should be used in 
accordance with all the normal laws of gram- 
mar and rhetoric, so far as the latter study is 
concerned with intelligibility, unless, indeed, 
we wish to produce certain legitimate effects 
of illusion through the use of an illiterate 
dialect. This is but to say that our words 
should be grouped properly into phrases, 
clauses, sentences, and paragraphs ; that 
grammar and rhetoric are sciences that un- 
derlie literature, There is also another under^ 
lying science — viz., logic. It is plain that 
our words grammatically and rhetorically 
grouped, since they are to convey thought 
and knowledge, cannot make obvious non- 
160 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

sense. If in any way they cause the mind to 
go through reasoning processes, they should 
guide correctly, and not perplex or nonplus 
the reader's intellect. On the same principle 
our grouped words must be true to all such 
facts of experience as are essential to the valid- 
ity of the thought and knowledge to be con- 
veyed. Such a group of words as " giant scrub 
oaks " could be admitted into a literary work 
only when some special reason, such as an 
attempt at humor, justified the combination. 

We see, then, that our written words must 
be arranged and governed in the manner in- 
dicated above; in other terms, our medium 
of expression must consist of written words 
that are not incongruous. It is at once 
obvious that such words ought to be suffi- 
cient to convey all the thought and knowledge 
that we can ever have to express under normal 
circumstances. We need only inquire, there- 
fore, how written words that make sense can 
be made to receive sustained emotions of a 
pleasurable sort, and to communicate them to 
the reader. This can be accomplished first 
by imparting to one's words adequate rhythm 
and euphony and harmony; secondly, by 
using in addition words that connote things 
and ideas, the suggestion of which will call 
up in the reader emotions which are not 
i» i6i 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

strained, and in which the element of pleasure 
on the whole predominates over that of pain. 
It follows, if what has just been stated be true, 
that our medium of expression must consist 
of written words specially chosen and specially 
arranged, and that the essential problem 
before every would-be literary man, after he 
has mastered the rules of grammar, of rhet- 
oric, so far as they relate to intelligibility, 
and of logic, and has obtained sufficient 
thought and knowledge to serve as a basis or 
a carrying statement for the emotions he 
would impart, is concerned with the choice 
of emotive words and their rhythmical, eu- 
phonious, and harmonious arrangement. The 
more valuable the thought and knowledge he 
can contrive to convey with these emotive 
and attractively arranged words the more 
important in all cases his literary work will 
be; but he is none the less primarily con- 
cerned with the choice and arrangement of 
words — that is to say, he must, consciously 
or unconsciously, apply all the principles of 
rhetoric, including poetics, that do not relate 
specifically to mere intelligibility. Now let us 
endeavor to obtain some adequate information 
upon these important matters of the arrange- 
ment and the choice of written words neces- 
sary to the production of real literature. 
162 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 



IV 



Words in a truly literary composition are 
arranged rhythmically because, as psychology 
teaches us, it is a law of our nature for our 
emotions to express themselves rhythmically 
and to be excited by rhythm. Rhythm, from 
a Greek word that means " flowing," is 
** movement in time characterized by equahty 
of measures and by alternation of tension 
(stress) and relaxation." It is represented 
in nature by the beating of the heart, by the 
movement of waves, by the swaying of leaves. 
In speech it is represented by the succession 
of emphatic and unemphatic syllables, which 
delights the ear just as the rhythmical sway- 
ing of a blade of grass delights the eye. 
There is, of course, some sort of rhythm in 
all speech — a fact which unites this noble 
capacity of man with the universal life of 
nature — for all life seems to be based on 
motion, in which rhythm could invariably be 
discovered if we only had the proper organs 
of apprehension. But the rhythm latent in 
conversation and in the written style — writ- 
ten words sounded to the inner ear yield 
rhythm — of men who have no great power 

163 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

of translating their emotions into language is 
practically unrecognizable for the most part ; 
hence it is that conversation, unless it concern 
some exciting topic, pleasant or unpleasant, 
or be conducted by a master of the art, fails, as 
a rule, to appeal profoundly to our emotions, 
and the same is true of the majority of the 
books that are written. When, however, the 
emotions of an author are really excited, he 
tends to arrange his words in such a way that 
they either suggest a rhythm that stimulates 
the emotions of others or else fall into an un- 
mistakable rhythm which can be measured 
accurately. In the former case he composes 
what we call normally literary prose ; in the 
latter case he composes something in meas- 
ured rhythm, or metre, which we call usually 
poetry. These two divisions exhaust litera- 
ture between them.^ 

1 There is no need to discuss at any length the time- 
worn question whether there can be such a thing as poetry 
not couched in metrical language. According to the terms 
of our description of literature, all the essential features of 
literary production will be found in every piece of true 
prose and verse ; the line of demarcation furnished by 
measurement of rhythm is, therefore, essential only in the 
determination of questions relative to degree of emotionsl 
pleasure excited, not to kind. It seems to be clear, from 
the data of general experience, that the emotional pleasure 
resulting from the use of measured rhythm is, all other 
things being equal, and the subject or carrying statement 
164 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

Now it is obvious that while there is a 
specific line of demarcation — viz., the pos- 
sibility of measurement of rhythm — between 
literary prose and poetry, there is none, so 
far as rhythm is concerned, between literary 
prose and prose that is not literary. But 
the absence of a line of strict demarcation 
proves no more in this case than it does in 
the case of the animal and vegetable king- 
doms. There are forms of life, like sponges, 
that seem or once seemed to belong to either 
kingdom or to both; so there are kinds of 
prose about which it might be impossible to 
decide fully whether they belong to the cate- 
gory of literary prose or not. But above 
and below sponges we get unmistakable ani- 
mals and plants, and so above and below the 
dubious varieties of prose mentioned we get 
prose that is plainly literary and the reverse 
— the assumption being made, of course, 
that with the majority of educated readers, 

being capable of sustaining the more intense emotional 
force resulting from the use of measured rhythm, greater 
than that consequent upon the employment of unmeasured 
rhythm ; hence it is advisable to insist firmly on the fact 
that there is a literature couched in measured rhythm 
which we call by convention poetry, and a literature 
couched in unmeasured rhythm which we call by convention 
prose. The names are thus seen to be conventional, but 
the varieties of literature that they represent are distinct 
in one important particular. See note i, page 170. 

165 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

or else with the body of critics, the power 
resides of speaking more or less authorita- 
tively on such points. If now what has just 
been said be true, it follows that literature in 
prose must be characterized by an adequate 
rhythm. The amount and character of this 
rhythm need not occupy us here, although it 
should be noted that some critics have denied 
that rhythm is necessary to literary prose. 
What does concern us is simply the fact that 
rhythm, being the language of the emotions, 
is naturally employed in literature, the chief pur- 
pose of which is to embody these, and that, 
therefore, our would-be writer of literature 
must consciously or unconsciously employ 
rhythm whether he write in prose or verse. 
With regard to the euphonious arrange- 
ment of words, it may be observed that this, 
while not of such prime necessity as rhythmic 
arrangement, is nevertheless necessary in a 
secondary sense to all real literature, whether 
prose or poetry. Euphony, which is Greek 
for " having a good voice," implies a dis- 
tinctly pleasant arrangement of sounds in 
composition, and when we say that words 
in true literature should be arranged euphoni- 
ously we mean merely that care should be 
taken not to let the combination of sounds 
made by the words we use offend the outer 
1 66 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

or the inner ear by their dissonance or fre- 
quent repetition. The waves caused by cer- 
tain combinations of sounds produce physical 
effects upon the auditory nerves that are 
translated into unpleasant emotions on the 
part of the reader — for example, this effect 
is produced by an undue succession of s's as 
well as by the monotonous repetition of 
single words, phrasesj or clauses, the sound 
or sound-combinations of which might not 
have been unpleasant when experienced 
singly. But unpleasant feelings or emotions 
on the part of the reader obviously interfere 
with the transmission to him of the pleasant 
emotions of which the literary product is 
intended to be the medium. Hence the 
necessity of a euphonious arrangement of 
words is apparent. 

With regard to the necessity of a harmoni- 
ous arrangement of words we can afford to 
be equally brief Harmony, strictly speak- 
ing, refers to the adaptation of sound to 
sense, and is not required by the ear to any- 
thing like the same extent as rhythm and 
euphony. Still it has at times a distinct part 
to play in affecting the emotions of a reader, 
and is more or less to be found in all good 
literary work. And akin to harmony in 
sound is what we may call a mental harmony 
167 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

that should attach to a truly literary arrange^ 
ment of words. It cannot be doubted that 
there is a mental pleasure that results from 
the harmonious, or perhaps it would be best 
to say symmetrical, arrangement of the words 
and combinations of words that we employ 
which is analogous to the pleasure the eye 
obtains from the contemplation of symmetry 
in figures, A felicitous balanced or periodic 
sentence carries with it a charm of symmetry 
that gives pleasure to the cultivated and 
often to the uncultivated reader, and so en- 
hances the emotive value of the writing in 
which it is found. It cannot be doubted, 
also, that the attainment of symmetry in our 
arrangement of words often enhances their 
euphony in a subtle manner and helps us to 
attain that adequate rhythm which is neces- 
sary to literary prose. Aristotle long ^go 
pointed out that the period gave a sort of 
framework to the rhythm, helping it, prob^ 
ably, much as the blank verse period helps 
that subtle metre, but we need not enlarge 
on this here. It is sufficient for us to per- 
ceive in a general way why a rhythmical, 
euphonious, harmonious, and, we may add 
perhaps, symmetrical arrangement of words 
is a natural medium for the expression and 
communication of emotions. 
1 68 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 



We come now to the second of our methods 
for enabling written words to convey emo- 
tion — to wit, the choice of such words as 
connote an adequate number of ideas and 
things, the suggestion of which will call up 
in the reader emotions which are not over- 
tense and in which the element of pleasure 
predominates on the whole over that of pain.^ 
It might seem at first sight as if such choice 
of emotive words would be of itself sufficient 

1 It is obvious that pleasure must predominate over 
pain in the emotive effects of a work of art, or the latter 
would fail to accomplish the purpose for which all the 
arts exist. Even where the object represented is in 
itself one that, if fully realized in actual life, would cause 
us intensely painful emotions, thoroughly artistic repre- 
sentation will give us emotions on the whole pleasurable. 
This truth is illustrated in tragedy where the individual 
pity and fear of the spectator are made universalized 
emotions through the art of the poet, and are thus purged 
of grosser elements, with the result that the sympathetic 
nature receives an emotional relief that is distinctly pleas- 
ing. (See with regard to this " purging " the KdOapais of 
Aristotle, Butcher's Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and 
the Fine Arts, page 225.) Sometimes what would be 
unpleasantly disgusting in actual life receives in art a 
representation that is humorous and provokes pleasant 
smiles, as is illustrated by a well-known picture by Rubens 
in the Ufiizi gallery. 

169 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

to express and convey emotions, and so to 
constitute literature, that literature is after all, 
merely a matter of diction. A moment's 
reflection will enable us, however, to see that 
this is not so, since rhythm is in some way 
essential to the utterance of emotions and, if 
not adequately present, is missed with the 
result that the composition is partly displeas- 
ing, and since lack of euphony and harmony 
would in almost every case take away so 
much from the effects of the emotive terms 
used that the reader would experience sen- 
sations the reverse of pleasing. On the other 
hand, it is possible for words rhythmically, 
euphoniously, and harmoniously arranged 
to give pleasure without the presence of a 
single recognizably emotive word — a pleas- 
ure sufficient perhaps to assure a reader that 
he is perusing something that belongs to 
literature. This can be proved by showing 
a person ignorant of Latin how to read aloud 
properly some of Virgil's Hues. He will in 
most cases feel delighted with what he does 
not understand, and will be ready to admit 
that it must possess high literary value, and 
this quite apart from the pleasant effect pro- 
duced, as we shall see, by the vague. ^ It 

^ It is dubious whether doggerel in a foreign language, 
read naturally, would produce this effect, for the simple 
170 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

may be doubted, however, whether, strictly 
speaking, any writer has ever put together a 
considerable number of words in a really 
rhythmical, euphonious, and harmonious 
manner without employing emotive terms. 

But whether or not emotive words are 
always present in any given piece of truly 
literary work, it is easy to see why their use 
is more or less necessary. There are many 
things and ideas about which we have emo- 
tions stored up. The words that represent 
these things and ideas act very much as the 
electric spark that discharges a heap of 
powder. The moment we hear them, our 
stored-up emotions explode, as it were, and 
we are aglow with delight. For example, in 
the splendid lines of Keats, 

Charmed magic casements opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas in faery-lands forlorn, 

reason that doggerel does not carry emotion with it, and 
when read aloud to a person ignorant of the language 
would not be likely to affect him pleasantly unless the 
reader threw unwarranted emotion into his reading. We 
may notice in this connection that doggerel does not come 
under our description of literature, and thus is not poetry, 
although it is couched in metre, either because it contains 
no emotive words, as in the mnemonic jingle, "Thirty 
days hath September," or because such emotive words 
and their metrical setting as are used in it are in some 
way incongruous or commonplace. 
171 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

every epithet and practically all the nouns 
will be found to call up emotions. Think 
of what emotions, dating back to our child- 
hood, the word " faery-lands " unlocks ! 
Even the unusual spelling has an emotional 
value. There is almost no limit to the emo- 
tive power of properly chosen and arranged 
words; indeed, a mere word itself that is 
unfamiliar and euphonious will often pro- 
duce emotions which former experience of 
the vague and uncertain has stored up in us. 
For instance, Milton's line, 

Looks toward Namancos and Bayonafs hold, 

has caused special emotions of pleasure to 
many people chiefly because they knew 
nothing about the two small places in Spain 
which have been identified only of recent 
years by zealous commentators. On the 
other hand, it should be remarked that a 
new word, not suggestive of the vague and 
not specially euphonious, calls up naturally 
little or no emotion — which is a partial ex- 
planation of the fact that as our vocabulary 
improves so does our literary appreciation. 

But we have perhaps said enough about 

the value of the use of emotive words in 

literature, and it remains only to explain 

our qualifying remarks about the necessity 

172 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

of avoiding a strain to the reader's emotions 
and a predominance of pain over pleasure. 
Our qualification is dependent, of course, 
on the fact that literature in our sense of 
the term is one of the fine arts, and that, 
as we have seen, one of the main objects 
of all the fine arts is to give pleasure. 
We are secure of pleasure, to a certain 
extent, if the words presented to us are 
rhythmically, euphoniously, and harmoni- 
ously arranged, but so great is the emotive 
force of words that it may happen that the 
mysterious inner self, which underlies our 
emotions, may be overstirred or strained by 
the discharge of too powerful or of painful 
emotions previously stored up, and that in 
consequence the pleasure resulting from the 
perception of rhythm, euphony, and har- 
mony may be neutralized by pain caused 
by overstressed or unsuitable emotions, or 
actually drowned therein. It is just here 
that many writers, even experienced ones, 
are liable to go astray. They use a word 
which to them connotes pleasure, and find 
to their surprise that it connotes for another 
only what is disagreeable. They use a com- 
bination of words that leaves a sense of 
delicate sweetness with them and with some 
of their friends, and behold ! the general 
^71) 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

public has only the sense of being cloyed 
and of wonder at the number of minor 
poets continually being discovered by 
enthusiastically generous critics.. 



VI 



But this power which we posit of using 
emotive words that kindle emotions in the 
reader, what is it but another way of nam- 
ing that faculty which by some critics under 
the influence of the Germans and of Cole- 
ridge is held to impart the determining 
characteristic of all truly literary products — 
the faculty of the creative imagination? 
The poet or prose writer who possesses 
imagination transforms the empirical world 
into an ideal world of images, and in the 
process finds what we term his aesthetic emo- 
tions pleasurably excited. His intellectual 
and moral emotions, to use our former 
phraseology, are also sympathetically af- 
fected and cannot be satisfied (certainly in 
the case of the moral ones) without some 
effort on his part to communicate them to 
other people. He makes use at once of the 
medium of expression most suitable to his 
174 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

purpose — viz., words rhythmically, eupho- 
niously, and harmoniously arranged, his 
aesthetic sense directing him as to the most 
fitting rhythm and sound-sequences that he 
can employ. This same sense or, if we 
prefer so to term it, his imagination teaches 
him also what words have most power to 
express the emotions with which he is sur- 
charged. These emotions are the result of 
his transformation of the actual world of 
experience into an ideal world of images, 
and the faculty which enabled him to form 
mental images enables him also to find emo- 
tive words which will call up such images 
in the minds of all who read him, provided 
they too are gifted with imagination, not 
indeed necessarily creative, but at least re- 
ceptive. Hence it is that in all highly emo- 
tive literature, such as poetry and oratory, 
the words used tend, either singly or in 
combination, to be representative of con- 
crete images, or at least to suggest such 
images vividly — which is but to say that 
figurative language is essential to highly 
emotive literature. We see, therefore, that 
our preceding analysis of the nature of the 
medium of expression employed in the pro- 
duction of literature might be resumed in 
the single statement that literature consists 
175 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

of words chosen and arranged by the 
imaginative faculty. 

There is, however, one other point to be 
considered before we can regard our analysis 
as fairly complete. Properly chosen and ar- 
ranged emotive words will give us hterary 
pleasure from the moment we begin a good 
poem or piece of prose, but an additional 
pleasure comes to us as we progress in our 
reading and become conscious of the sym- 
metry of the parts of the composition and, 
finally, of its unity as a whole. These emo- 
tions, connected with symmetry and unity, 
are very complex, and seem to be partly aes- 
thetic, partly intellectual, partly moral in 
character. The perception of symmetry, so 
far as the quality does not affect the rhythm, 
harmony, and euphony of the composition, 
can hardly be aesthetic, but is rather intel- 
lectual in character, since neither the eye nor 
the ear, the two channels through which ex- 
citations to aesthetic pleasure are in the main 
received from the outer world, is affected, but 
only the mind. The perception of unity gives 
an unmistakable intellectual pleasure, but this 
seems to disappear when the whole that is 
imaged by the imaginative composition — 
whether it be an action or a character or 
some feature of external nature that is por^ 
176 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

trayed — is realized completely for what it is. 
Then, according as our sense for beauty or 
our sense for conduct is stirred, the pleasure 
consequent upon the perception of unity — 
that is, the intellectual emotion, merges into 
an aesthetic or a moral emotion, or, perhaps, 
into a mixed one, if such a thing be possible.^ 
If the intellectual pleasure resulting from the 
perception of unity be thus lost in the aes- 
thetic pleasure indicated above, it follows 
that the aesthetic emotions which, according 
to our analysis, are unloosed by the reading 
of a truly literary composition are supple- 
mented by a varying quantity of similar emo- 
tions which serve to crown our reading with 
complete success,^ and which may, when they 
have somewhat cooled, excite into sympa- 
thetic action moral emotions of gratitude to 

1 This merging of one emotion into another is sometimes 
accomplished so quickly as to escape observation, but per- 
haps takes place whenever we are brought in contact with 
any work of art. For example, in contemplating a fine 
flower piece we probably have an instantaneous perception 
of the unity of the composition, with a resulting intellec- 
tual pleasure which passes into an aesthetic pleasure con- 
sequent upon imaginative contact with something that 
delights the eye, and which may become powerful once 
more when we have gazed sufficiently. 

2 It is probably this concluding stock of emotions 
that is chiefly revitalized when we remember books with 
pleasure. 

177 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

the literary artist who has charmed us and of 
thankfulness to the Divine Power that has 
bestowed the gift of creative imagination 
upon our fellow man and of receptive imagi- 
nation upon ourselves. Moral emotions of a 
similar kind are excited also by the intellec- 
tual emotions that come to us during our 
perusal of a work of literature through our 
perception of symmetry in the parts of the 
composition. It must be remembered, how- 
ever, that intellectual and moral emotions 
connected with the perception of symmetry 
and unity may be excited in us by works not 
at all Hterary in character ; as, for example, 
by a process of mathematical or scientific 
reasoning. Hence we infer that the only safe 
test for determining whether a given product 
is literary or not is to ascertain whether or 
not it affects pleasurably the aesthetic sense.^ 

^ We must refrain, for lack of space, from discussing 
Schopenhauer's suggestive essay on Beauty and Interest 
in Works of Art further than to say that if we agree with 
him in regarding "beauty as an affair of knowledge " that 
appeals to the knowing subject because it is always con- 
nected with the idea, while interest, on the other hand, is 
an affair of the will, we may nevertheless contend that the 
idea of beauty is inseparably connected with emotions to 
which we give the name " aesthetic," while interest is con- 
nected with emotions either of intellectual curiosity or of 
moral sympathy or repulsion. The value of our analysis 
remains, therefore, unaffected by Schopenhauer's ingeni- 

178 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

We have now practically obtained the de- 
scription of literature that we set out to seek, 
and we perceive that each one of its compo- 
nent terms may be made a test to determine 
by its presence or absence whether a given 
product is literature or not. We have found 
that nothing belongs to real literature unless 
it consists of written words that constitute a 
carrying statement which makes sense, ar- 
ranged rhythmically, euphoniously, and har- 
moniously, and so chosen as to connote an 
adequate number of ideas and things the 
suggestion of which will call up in the reader 
sustained emotions which do not produce 
undue tension and in which the element of 
pleasure predominates, on the whole, over 
that of pain. Practically every term of this 
description should be kept in our minds, so 
that we may consciously apply it as a test to 
any piece of writing about the literary char- 
acter of which we are in doubt. It now 
behooves us to endeavor to determine what 
consequences will naturally flow from the 

ous discussion, nor is it affected by the subtle speculations 
of Vernon Lee and C. Anstruther Thompson in their re- 
cent articles in the Contemporary Review entitled Beauty 
and Ugliness, articles which, whether accepted in their 
entirety or not, make a most important contribution to 
that theory of aesthetics which British and American critics 
so thoroughly neglect, to the detriment of their work. 

1/9 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

stand we have taken with regard to this 
vexed question of the nature of Hterature. 



VII 



One or two consequences have been already- 
noted. We have of course set outside the 
pale of literature all speech that is not re- 
corded, and we have treated similarly all the 
records of mere knowledge or of thought or 
of both. We have insisted on the presence 
of sustained aesthetic emotions in the writer, 
which are so expressed as to appeal in a 
sustained and pleasurable manner to the aes- 
thetic sense of the reader. This is but to say 
that we have insisted that all true literature 
must move us in a personal way, which may 
be intellectual and moral in character, but 
must also be aesthetic. It follows, then, that 
our description of literature will transsect 
many of the received categories of prose; 
for all true poetry, appealing as it does to 
the aesthetic emotions, is plainly literature by 
the terms of our analysis. For example, we 
infer that there are biographies which are 
mere material for the historical specialist, 
such as those family memoirs so popular at 
present, and biographies that belong to per- 
i8o 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

manent literature, like Boswell's Johnson. 
Books of travel, of history, and of criticism 
may be similarly divided. The moment we 
refuse to be guided by subject-matter, the 
moment we ask primarily what a book does 
rather than what it is, we find that the 
number of books contained in many of the 
categories of prose shrivels considerably. 

It is, however, only the categories that do 
not lend themselves especially to emotional 
exploitation that so shrink. Whenever a 
category of prose like the novel naturally 
holds by the emotions we find that our tests 
are really more liberal than those applied by 
most critics. We ask only that the composi- 
tion to be judged shall consist of words 
sufficiently well chosen and arranged to pro- 
duce a sustained and pleasurable effect upon 
the aesthetic sense, positing always, of course, 
that the composition in question shall con- 
form to the laws of grammar and logic, and 
shall be so far true to nature and experience 
as not to produce intellectual dissatisfaction 
sufficient to neutralize the desiderated aesthetic 
excitation.^ 

1 It is just here, of course, that most writers of fiction 
fail to satisfy the demands of readers of wide experience 
and culture, while pleasing the masses who are without 
high or strict standards. 

i8i 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

It will be observed that we here ask only 
for certain positive qualities of feeling and 
style, and for not much positive thought or 
intellectual power, pure and simple, and that 
not a few novelists could stand our tests; 
whereas, very few, considering the vast num- 
ber that write, stand the tests applied by 
most critics and historians of literature. 
This leads us to consider a very important 
question. Are not our tests really too easy? 
Must we not require, besides emotion, a 
considerable amount of positive intellectual 
power in every writer whose work is worthy 
to be called literary? We have already fore-, 
stalled these questions, and partly answered 
them, by citing the case of Foe's Ulalume, 
and we might fortify ourselves by quoting 
much from M. Victor Hugo, whom some of 
us regard as the greatest poet since Goethe, 
and from Hugo's English admirer, Mr. Swin- 
burne. None of these poets has ever pro- 
duced anything that is not literary in a very 
real and sometimes a very high sense; but 
they have all been capable of writing a good 
deal of undoubted poetry that required very 
little exercise of the strictly intellectual 
powers for its production. Our illustrations 
might be greatly extended, more particularly 
of course in the field of poetry, where pure 
182 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

emotion can sustain itself better than in prose 
without what we may call intellectual vitaliz- 
ing; but we have said enough for our pur- 
pose. We have not, however, commented 
sufficiently on the classes of persons by 
whom our tests should be applied, and when 
we shall have done this, it will appear at a 
glance that we have really obtained elastic, 
rather than easy, methods of determining 
what literature is in its essence. 

It will be obvious enough to any one who 
has followed our reasoning closely, that when 
we demand that all compositions which con- 
sist of words so chosen and arranged as to 
excite sustained and pleasurable aesthetic 
emotions shall be denominated literature, 
we must either posit some typical reader 
whose aesthetic sense will serve as a standard, 
or be willing to admit that there are as many 
grades of literature as there are varieties and 
grades of the aesthetic sense in humanity. 
Bold as the position may appear to be, we 
are willing both to posit this and to admit 
this. All writings that have satisfied the 
critical requirements of past ages and the 
value of which is substantiated by the con- 
servative academic critics of the present day, 
may be fairly said to satisfy the aesthetic sense 
of a typical reader — that is, of a man whose 

183 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

tastes are catholic and properly trained by 
education and by private study and reflection. 
Every critic, except the extreme impressionist 
perhaps, practically assumes that he is such a 
typical reader when he judges a book ; and 
when the majority of critics, after due time 
has been allowed for the elimination of purely 
personal and temporary elements of criticism, 
agree on the literary character of the work in 
question, it may reasonably be said to satisfy 
the aesthetic sense of a typical reader. 

On the other hand nothing can be plainer 
than that there are various grades of litera- 
ture appealing to all classes of people and 
that the rigid critic and literary historian 
need not be frightened at the fact. For their 
purposes they have only to ascertain the 
verdict of the typical reader just described, 
and discuss or register that. This is practi- 
cally what they do now, and they need not 
give themselves any more concern about the 
novels of Mr. E. P. Roe and Miss Marie 
Corelli than they do about the yellow-backed 
fiction sold on our railway trains or the 
continued stories that figure in the sensational 
journals. If, however, they are interested in 
the more or less philosophical aspects of 
literary study, they will find it hard to refute 
the claim that the novels of Mr. Roe and 
184 






THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

Miss Corelli are popular with certain readers 
for practically the same reasons for which the 
novels of Scott, Balzac, Tolstoi', and Mr. 
Howells are popular with readers of higher 
aesthetic development — viz., that they make 
primarily a pleasurable appeal to the aesthetic 
emotions. We may call the novels of the 
latter writers literature, and of the former 
writers stuff, if we choose ; but logically we 
have no more right to say that the two 
classes of fiction differ generically than we 
have to say that the inhabitants of Murray 
Hill are human beings and those of the 
Bowery mere brutes. We find it necessary 
to divide mankind into social classes, and 
thus for purposes of criticism and education 
we divide Hterature into various grades and 
consider only the higher ones; but this 
should not bHnd us to the unity that in both 
cases underlies our division.^ 

We conclude, therefore, that our tests are 
elastic rather than too easy, and we shall 
bring our discussion to a close by remarking 
that by making free use of our elastic tests 
we shall not only be better able to sympathize 
with the literary tastes of people of inferior 

1 See on this point Mr. Brander Matthews' valuable 
essay On Pleasing the Taste of the Public, in his 
Aspects of Fiction. 

185 



THE NATURE OF LITERATURE 

culture, and so be able to help them to rise in 
the scale of taste and intelligence, but also be 
more certain to comprehend and supply the 
literary needs of children, whether they are 
our own or else are confided to our guidance. 
The teaching as well as the criticism of pure 
literature will be greatly improved from the 
moment teachers and critics pay more atten- 
tion to the emotive than to the intellectual 
qualities of literature, from the moment they 
begin to ask what literature does rather than 
what it is. 



1 86 



ON TRANSLATING HORACE 



187 



V 
ON TRANSLATING HORACE 

That to attempt to translate Horace is to 
attempt the impossible is a statement that has 
long since passed into a proverb, of which 
no one makes greater use than the Horatian 
translator himself. Perhaps we owe to this 
proverbial impossibility the fact that the 
translator of Horace is always with us. A 
living, breathing antinomy, he writes a modest 
preface, then, muttering to himself " nil mor- 
talibus ardui est,'' he tries to scale very heaven 
in his folly, to rush blindly *^ per vetitum 
nefas!' But because he has loved much, 
therefore shall much be forgiven him. If 
Horace were not Horace, his translators would 
be more successful, but surely they would 
be fewer in number. To love Horace pas- 
sionately and not try to translate him would 
be to flout that principle of altruism in which 
Mr. Kidd discovers, poetically though not 
philosophically, the motive force of civiliza- 
tion. " We love Horace, therefore we must 
endeavor to set him forth in a way to make 
others love him," is what all translators say 
189 



ON TRANSLATING HORACE 

to themselves, consciously or unconsciously, 
when they decide to publish their respective 
renditions. And who shall blame them? 
For where is the critic, competent to judge 
their work, who has not himself listened to 
the Siren's song, if but for a moment in his 
youth, who has not a version of some Hora- 
tian ode hid away in his portfolio, the mem- 
ory of which will forever prevent him from 
flinging stones at his fellow offenders ? 

But, if to translate Horace be impossible, 
it is hardly less impossible to explain fully 
the causes of his unbounded popularity. 
Admirers of Lucretius and Catullus tell us 
very plainly that he is not a great poet, but 
somehow we do not resent the charge; we 
only read him, if possible, more diligently 
and affectionately. We leave our critical 
faculties in abeyance when Dante ^ introduces 
him to us along with Homer and Ovid and 
Lucan, and our hearts tell us that he is, in 
the truest sense, worthy to walk with the 
greatest of these companions. We feel sure 
that Virgil must have loved him as a man ; we 
have proof that Milton loved him as a poet. 
We deny to him " the grand manner," but 
we attribute to him every charm. When we 
seek to analyze this charm, we find that where 

1 Inferno^ I., 89. 
190 



ON TRANSLATING HORACE 

we can point out ten of its elements, such as 
wit, humor, vivacity, sententiousness, kindli- 
ness, and the like, there are ten others, 
equally potent but more subtle, that escape 
us altogether. So we turn the saying of 
Buffon into *' the charm is the man," and 
contentedly exchange analysis for enjoyment. 
And yet we are firmly persuaded that no 
author is more worthy of the painstaking 
study characteristic of modern scholarship 
than is this same Epicurean poet, who so 
utterly defies analysis and would be the first 
to smile at our ponderous erudition. We feel 
that the scholar who should devote the best 
years of his life to studying the influence of 
Horace upon subsequent literatures, and to 
collecting the tributes that have been paid to 
his genius by the great and worthy of all 
lands and ages, would deserve our heartfelt 
benedictions.^ We conclude, in short, that 
that most exquisite of epithets, ** the well- 
beloved," so inappropriately bestowed upon 
the worthless and flippant French king, be- 
longs to Horace and to Horace alone, jure 
divino. 

We are concerned here, however, rather 
with Horace's translators than with Horace 

^ See in this connection the eloquent paragraph in Sir 
Theodore Martin's Works of Horace, vol. i., p. 182. 
191 



ON TRANSLATING HORACE 

himself, for my purpose is to say a few words 
about the methods of rendering the poet that 
have most commended themselves of recent 
years. So much has been written upon this 
subject and so much remains to be written, 
that it is hard to determine where to begin ; 
but I fancy that the preface of the late Pro- 
fessor Conington to his well-known transla- 
tion of the Odes will furnish a proper point 
of departure. Few persons, whether trans- 
lators or readers, can object to Conington's 
first premise that the translator ought to aim 
at *' some kind of metrical conformity to his 
original." To reproduce an original Sapphic 
or Alcaic in blank verse, or in the couplet of 
Pope, is to repel at once the reader who 
knows his Horace, and to give the reader who 
is ignorant of Latin a totally erroneous con- 
ception of the rhythmical method of the poet. 
To render a compressed Latin verse by a 
diffuse EngHsh one is, as Conington points 
out, to do injustice to the sententiousness for 
which Horace is justly celebrated, — although 
it must be remarked that the translator should 
not, in order to avoid diffuseness, be led astray 
as Mr. Gladstone was recently by the '' fatal 
faciHty" of the octosyllabic couplet. To 
translate Horace, except on occasions, into j 
anything but quatrains, is also to handicap 
192 






ON TRANSLATING HORACE 

one's reader heavily from the metrical point 
of view. It seems to me, however, that when 
Professor Conington insisted that an EngHsh 
measure once adopted for the Alcaic must be 
used for every ode in which Horace employed 
the latter stanza — a practice which Mr. Glad- 
stone avoided — he went far toward handicap- 
ping the translator, who, after all, has his rights. 
That such uniformity ought to be aimed at, 
and will be aimed at, is doubtless true ; but 
there is one element of the problem with 
which Professor Conington did not suffi- 
ciently reckon. This is rhyme, which he 
assumes to be necessary at present to a suc- 
cessful rendition of a Horatian ode. A uni- 
form rhymeless stanza can probably be 
applied to all odes in a particular measure 
without any special loss resulting. But this 
can hardly be the case with a rhyming stanza, 
if the translator aim, as he should do, at a 
fairly, though not meticulously, literal render- 
ing of his original and not at the paraphrasing 
which so often satisfied Mr. Gladstone. There 
will necessarily be coincidences of sound in 
a literal prose version of a Latin stanza that 
will suggest a particular arrangement of 
rhymes for a poetical version. To adopt a 
uniform English stanza is to do away with 
this natural advantage, which presents itself 
^3 193 



ON TRANSLATING HORACE 

to the translator oftener than might be sup- 
posed. 

A concrete example will suffice to make 
my meaning clear. The third ode of the 
First Book, the well-known Sic te diva potens 
Cypri, is in what is called the Second Ascle- 
piad metre; so is the dehghtful third ode 
of the Ninth Book, the Donee gratus eram 
tibi. We will assume that the translator 
has chosen for the Sic te diva, a quatrain 
with alternating rhymes. Following Professor 
Conington's rule of uniformity, he must 
employ the same stanza for the Donee gratus 
erain^ which, by the way, Conington did 
not do for reasons he explained at length. 
Now the sixth stanza of the latter ode runs 
as follows : 

" Quid si prisca redit Venus 

Diductosque jugo cogit aeneo, 
Si flava excutitur Chloe, 

Rejectaeque patet janua Lydiae." 

This may be translated : 

" What if the former love return and join with brazen 
yoke the parted ones, if yellow-haired Chloe be shaken 
off, and the door stand open for rejected Lydia ? " 

If my memory does not deceive me, it was 
this stanza, and especially one word in its 
last verse, that determined the arrangement 

194 



ON TRANSLATING HORACE 

of rhymes in a version I attempted years ago, 
Consule Planco. This verse seemed to run 
inevitably into 

" And open stand for Lydia the door.'''' 

It needed but a moment to detect in the first 
verse of the stanza a sufficient rhyme. The 
syllable re of rediicit furnished more, not per- 
haps the most apt of rhymes with door, but 
still sufficient, as things go with translators, 
and with a pardonable tautology I wrote — 

" What if the former love once more 
Return — " 

Two other rhymes were found with little 
difficulty in the di of didiictos and in excutitury 
which suggested wide and cast aside, and the 
whole stanza appeared, omitting strictly met- 
rical considerations, as follows : 

" What if the former love once more 

Return and yoke the lovers parted wide, 
If Chloe, yellow-haired, be cast aside. 
And open stand for Lydia the door ? " 

This stanza certainly had the merit of literal- 
ness — it omitted only the rather unessential 
epithet rejectaeand compressed the phrase///^*? 
coo^-it ae?ieo — and I thought it had some merits 
of rhythm and diction. So I took it as a model, 
and, with little difficulty, translated the re- 
195 



ON TRANSLATING HORACE 

mainder of the ode — with what amount of 
total success there is no need of discussing 
here. 

This example, with many more, has con- 
firmed me in my belief not only that uni- 
formity of measure is not to be insisted upon 
strictly in the case of rhyming stanzas, but 
also that translators should search more 
thoroughly than they seem to do, for what I 
may call the rhyme suggestions that are im- 
plicit in so many Horatian stanzas. I am 
convinced that any translator who, having 
adopted a quatrain with alternating rhymes 
for the Sic te divay should persist in reject- 
ing a quatrain with internal rhymes for the 
Donee gratus eramy simply because he was 
bent on preserving uniformity, would be 
hampering himself and doing an injustice to 
his original. 

Upon other points it is easier to agree with 
Professor Conington. For a majority of the 
odes, the iambic movement, which is natural 
to English, is preferable. This Milton seems 
to have seen, his disuse of rhyme in his cele- 
brated version of the Qids multa gracilis 
(i., 5) having given him an opportunity for 
experiment in logaoedic verse, of which he 
did not avail himself Here, too, however, I 
must plead for a careful study of each ode by 
iq6 



ON TRANSLATING HORACE 

the translator, for I think that there are cases 
in which it would be almost disastrous to at- 
tempt an iambic rendering. Such a case is 
presented, perhaps, by the '* Diffugere nives'* 
(iv., 7). The iambic renderings of Professor 
Conington and Sir Theodore Martin seem to 
me to stray far from the original movement 
— • as far as the former's : 

" * No 'scaping death ' proclaims the year ^' 

does from the diction of Horace or of any 
other poet. Both would have done better to 
transfer as far as they could the Latin move- 
ment to their English renderings. It is true 
that English dactyls are dangerous things, 
especially in translations, where the padding 
or " packing " which is natural to them, is 
increased by the padding natural to a trans- 
lation from a synthetic into an analytic lan- 
guage; but the dactylic movement of the 
First Archilochian, in which the Diffugere 
nives is written, is hardly to be transferred 
into English iambics at all. It presents more 
difficulty than the transference of the move- 
ment of hexameters proper into our blank 
verse. 

Where the translator, however, makes up 
his mind to attempt a close approximation 
to the classical metre, I am of the opinion 
197 



ON TRANSLATING HORACE 

that he should eschew the use of rhyme as 
too foreign to his original. But, since the 
use of rhyme seems, as Conington holds, to 
be essential at present, if the EngHsh version 
is to be acceptable as poetry, this close ap- 
proximation can be desirable in a few special 
cases only. It will not do to dogmatize on 
such matters^ but it may be safely said that 
no poet has yet accustomed the English ear 
to the use of rhymeless verse in lyrical poetry. 
What some future master may accomplish 
is another matter. Here and there a success- 
ful rhymeless lyric like Collins's famous Ode 
to Evening, or Tennyson's Alcaics on Mil- 
ton, shows us that rhymeless stanzas may be 
used in lyric poetry with great effect; but 
so far the translators of Horace that have 
eschewed rhyme have failed as a rule, like 
the late Lord Lytton, to give us versions that 
charm. Yet charm is what they should 
chiefly endeavor to convey. 

I am still more convinced that Professor 
Conington is right when he insists that the 
EngHsh should be confined *' within the same 
number of lines as the Latin." He is surely 
right when he taxes Sir Theodore Martin, 
who so frequently violates this rule, with an 
exuberance that is totally at variance with 
the severity of the classics. This exuber- 
198 



ON TRANSLATING HORACE 

ance Is almost certain to make its presence 
felt if the translator abandon the strict num- 
ber of the Hnes into which Horace has com- 
pressed his thought. It results, too, from a 
division into stanzas of over four veses. There 
is no rule of translation that will so effectively 
insure a successful retention of the diction of 
the original as this of the Hne for Hne render- 
ing. And that the diction and the thought 
of the poet should be more closely followed 
than is usually the case, admits of no manner 
of doubt. I have already said that a close 
scrutiny of the original will often suggest an 
almost literal rendering of the thought and 
diction. This Hteral rendering is naturally 
more desired by the reader who is familiar 
with Horace than by the reader who is not, 
but it will be both pleasing and serviceable 
to the latter, if not too slavishly obtained. 
Metrical considerations and general smooth- 
ness ought to weigh with every translator, 
but they ought not to outweigh accurate 
rendering of diction and thought. In this 
connection I am not at all sure that Coning- 
ton does not go too far when he recommends 
the Horatian translator to hold by the diction 
of our own Augustan period. That the age 
of Pope corresponds in many respects with 
that of Horace is, of course, true enough, 
199 



ON TRANSLATING HORACE 

and the student of eighteenth century Eng- 
lish poetry is almost sure to be an admirer 
of the Roman *' bard " so fashionable at the 
time. But Horace's diction does not strike 
us as stilted, while Pope's often does; and 
for a modern translator to indulge in stilted 
diction is fatal not only to the intrinsic value 
of his work, but also to its popularity and 
hence to its present effectiveness. There is 
a good deal, too, about our poetry of the 
eighteenth century that is little short of 
commonplace ; but commonplace the trans- 
lator of Horace can least afford to be. Horace 
may approach dangerously near the com- 
monplace, yet he always misses it by a dex- 
terous and graceful turn. The translator, 
running after, will miss this turn often enough 
as it is ; he cannot, therefore afford to steep 
himself in a literature that has a tendency 
to the commonplace. 

To mention the eighteenth century and 
Horace is to bring up the thought ofHoratian 
paraphrases. A successful paraphrase is often- 
times better as poetry than a good poetical 
translation, and not infrequently gives a fuller 
idea of Horace's spirit. It is almost needless 
to praise the work in this kind of Mr. Austin 
Dobson and Mr. Eugene Field, But a para- 
phrase, however good, can never be entirely 

200 



ON TRANSLATING HORACE 

satisfying either to the reader that knows 
Horace or to the reader that desires to know 
him. Nor can a prose version be thoroughly 
satisfactory. What is wanted is not merely 
the drift of the poet's thought, but so far as 
is possible what he actually sang. The para- 
phrase may sing, and the prose version may 
give us the thought in nearly equivalent 
words, but neither answers our desires so 
well as a good poetical translation does — 
such a translation, let us say, as Professor 
Goldwin Smith's of the C(eIo tojtantem (iii., 5). 
Yet there is surely room for these three 
methods of rendering, and just as surely one 
could write indefinitely on the whole fascinat- 
ing subject did not one consult the interests 
of Horace and of one's readers. 



201 






VI 
THE BYRON REVIVAL 



203 



VI 

THE BYRON REVIVAL 

It is now some years since the late Prof. 
Nichol, in his excellent life of Byron, de- 
clared that his hero was ^' resuming his 
place," and that the closing quarter of the 
century would reverse the unjust verdict 
against him pronounced by the second and 
third quarters. Shortly after this statement 
was made, Matthew Arnold, as though to 
confirm its truth, published his well-known 
volume of selections from Byron's poetry, 
and maintained in his preface that when 
the year 1900 should be turned, the two 
chief names of modern English poetry would 
be those of Wordsworth and Byron. To 
the latter claim, Mr. Swinburne immediately 
replied, in what purported to be a critical 
essay on the two poets just named, but was 
really a marvellous dithyramb of inveterate 
prejudice. 

As might have been expected, Mr. Swin- 
burne, too, had a pair of chief poets to set up 
— to wit, Shelley and Coleridge. The con- 
205 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

troversy thus begun received some attention 
from the critics ; but the general pubHc was 
more interested in reading Tennyson and 
in forming Browning clubs. If the tide of 
favor began setting toward Byron, its move- 
ment was practically imperceptible; for as 
late as 1896 Prof. George Saintsbury could 
maintain, without serious loss to his reputa- 
tion as a critic, that Scott could not be 
ranked below Byron on any sound theory 
of poetical criticism, and that the latter 
could not be read in close juxtaposition 
with a real poet like Shelley without dis- 
astrous results to his fame. 

Twelve months later, however, Byron was 
being more discussed, if not more read. 
The war between Greece and Turkey natu- 
rally induced men to ponder upon his dis- 
interested devotion to the cause of Hellas 
and upon the glorious close of his wayward 
life. The newspapers took him up ; and 
certainly those of Paris, where I happened 
to be at the time, did not bear out the 
opinion afterward expressed to me by an 
eminent French critic, who was doubtless 
in the right, that the influence of Byron had 
somewhat waned in France. 

Close upon this transient notoriety came 
an important proof that the great poet's fame 
206 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

was not destitute of champions in his native 
land after the death of Matthew Arnold. 
The first volume of a critical edition of his 
complete works, under the editorship of 
Mr. W. E. Henley, was issued and cordially 
received ; and it was announced that Mr. 
John Murray would shortly draw on his 
stores of manuscripts, and pubHsh an edi- 
tion that should be practically final. Ac- 
cordingly we now have Mr. Henley's edition 
of the Letters from 1804 to 1813, and two 
volumes of the Murray edition — one con- 
taining the earlier poems, edited by Mr. 
Ernest Hartley Coleridge, and one contain- 
ing Letters dating from 1798 to 181 1, edited 
by Mr. Rowland E. Prothero. Both editions 
are to be in twelve volumes ; and the pub- 
lishers promise to complete them without 
loss of time. 

The simultaneous appearance of two such 
rival editions would be noteworthy in the 
case of any poet, but is particularly re- 
markable in the case of Byron. As Mr. 
Henley says, his own is " practically the 
first reissue on novel and peculiar lines 
which has been attempted for close on 
seventy years." There have been innumer- 
able popular editions of Byron to satisfy a 
demand which some booksellers pronounce 
207 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

constant, but others declare to be falling 
off; yet, to the present year, if any one 
wished to do critical work on the poet, he 
had to resort mainly to the seventeen-volume 
Murray edition of 1832. The general ex- 
cellence of this may partly account for the 
fact that in an age famous for textual criti- 
cism Byron did not receive until recently 
an honor long ago paid to Shelley and 
Wordsworth and Keats ; but one can hardly 
help believing that popular and critical in- 
difference was chiefly responsible for the 
neglect. Now, however, that in this im- 
portant particular he is receiving his own 
with interest, it may be well to take a nearer 
view of the rival editions. 

That of Mr. Murray is clearly the only one 
entitled to call itself complete : it is equally 
clear that he has been unfortunate in not 
securing Mr. Henley to edit it, with Mr. 
Prothero to edit Mr. Henley. Mr. Prothero 
has done his work well; he prints eighty 
more letters for the same space of time than 
Mr. Henley; but, as he gracefully acknowl- 
edges, he cannot handle his materials in 
the attractive way his rival can. Mr. Hen- 
ley's notes abound in errors, but are almost 
as interesting as the letters he annotates, — 
which is saying a great deal ; for Byron, 
208 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

with his dash, directness, and force, ranks 
near the very top of the world's great 
letter-writers. 

Mr. Henley's editorial success has a two- 
fold source — first, his devotion to Byron, 
whom he considers to be " the sole English 
poet (for Sir Walter conquered in prose) 
bred since Milton to Hve a master influence 
in the world at large," and second, his in- 
timate knowledge of the England of the 
Regency, whose hidebound, but corrupt, 
society could tolerate Castlereagh and Yar- 
mouth and the Prince himself, but drove 
Byron into exile. His knowledge and love 
of his subject are indeed so great that one 
would almost acknowledge him as an ideal 
editor, in spite of his talent for unscholarly, 
if trifling, blunders, did not one discover in 
his work a certain lack of refinement that is 
disturbing. For example, there was really 
no necessity for him to denominate Pierce 
Egan an " ass," or the quack that tortured 
Byron's foot an " ignorant brute." But, not- 
withstanding such blemishes and the normal 
assertiveness of his manner, there can be 
Httle doubt that Mr. Henley's will long re- 
main a most interesting edition of Byron for 
the general reader. 

This is not to say, however, that the hand- 
14 209 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

some Murray edition is valuable only be- 
cause it is complete and, apparently, final. 
Mr. Prothero has annotated the letters most 
carefully; and I cannot agree with those 
critics who think that he should have cast 
aside some of his materials. There are com- 
paratively few of the social notes and letters 
included that do not throw light on Byron's 
character; and nearly all are interesting. 
The latter statement cannot be made, of 
course, for the early poems, which Mr. Cole- 
ridge has annotated with scholarly thorough- 
ness. It will take the verve of Mr. Henley's 
notes to make the Hours of Idleness go 
down. I have re-read these youthful verses : 
and the only pleasure I could get from them 
lay in the fact that the various readings 
collated by the new editor seemed to show 
that, on the whole, when Byron altered a 
verse, he improved it — whence I derived 
a vague, but perhaps vain, hope that suc- 
ceeding volumes will enable us to think a 
little better of him as a technical artist than 
most of us, whether we admire him or not, 
are now able to do. 

The eleven fresh poems printed by Mr. 
Coleridge do not help matters out in the 
least; but this need not take the rehsh from 
the news that fifteen stanzas of Don Juan 

210 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

and a fairly large fragment of the third part 
of The Deformed Transformed are to be 
given us in due season. It is a pity, from 
the point of view of th6se who intend to use 
this edition to re-read their Byron slowly, 
that the publishers did not wait until two 
volumes of the poetry were ready. Even 
the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 
though it be admitted to be the best strictly 
literary satire between The Dunciad and 
A Fable for Critics, cannot neutralize the 
deadly effect of the Hours of Idleness 
and give life to this first of the six volumes 
that are to contain Byron's poetry. I know 
of no other poet of eminence who is so 
handicapped by his youthful verses. Others 
have written stuff as worthless, or even worse ; 
but no other that I can recall has barred 
the way to his great achievements by such 
a mass of uniformly immature and mediocre 
work. This has been said and thought 
thousands of times, to be sure, since the 
Edinburgh printed its needlessly harsh 
critique and stung Byron's genius into life; 
but it does not seem to have suggested, 
either to editors or to publishers, the pro- 
priety, in popular editions at least, of be- 
ginning the poetical works with the English 
Bards and printing the early verses as an 

21 I 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

appendix. We are constantly laboring to 
facilitate approach to our poets, we compile 
volumes of selections, we introduce them 
and annotate them ; yet we seldom adopt 
this easy and useful plan of putting their 
impedimenta in the rear. 

But have these two editions stimulated a 
real Byron revival, or can any rearrangement 
of his works make him genuinely popular 
once more among English readers? I can- 
not, with the best wish to persuade myself, 
beheve that any permanent reaction in his 
favor has as yet set in, nor am I at all confi- 
dent that he will ever be read with the old 
enthusiasm by all classes of people. My 
reasons for these opinions cannot be given 
without some discussion of his much-mooted 
rank as a poet ; but, as the point in question 
is one of real critical importance, and as the 
present is a particularly opportune time, I 
shall not shrink from taking part in what may 
seem at first thought to be a hopelessly in- 
volved controversy. 

Byron, as we all know, was acknowledged 
by his contemporaries, both at home and 
abroad, to be the master poet of his generation. 
He has practically lost this position in the 
eyes of English-speaking peoples, but has 
kept it among Continental peoples. Taine 

212 






THE BYRON REVIVAL 

and Castelar and Elze place him at the sum- 
mit of poetic renown, much as Goethe did 
over seventy years ago. No Englishman, 
however, not even Matthew Arnold, writes of 
him so enthusiastically as Sir Walter Scott 
could do in all sincerity. The reaction against 
him set in shortly after his death, Carlyle 
giving it potent voice; and to-day Words- 
worth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Brown- 
ing can count their partisans by scores, where 
Byron can count one. 

Nor is it merely a question of his relative 
rank among nineteenth-century poets. Such 
critics as Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Saintsbury, and 
Mr. Lionel Johnson have practically denied 
him any standing at all as a great poet ; and 
even his stanch admirers feel called upon to 
qualify their praise. When Arnold extolled 
him at the expense of Shelley, the critics, great 
and little, took a professional pleasure in 
charging their leader with being for once 
thoroughly erratic. 

Many reasons have been brought forward 
to account for this change of taste and 
opinion among Englishmen. Byron's enemies 
say that we are more clear-sighted than our 
grandfathers were, that we have stripped the 
masks from his Laras and Conrads and Man- 
freds, and exposed the tawdry pseudo-poet 
213 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

beneath ; that we know better than to receive 
a traveller's versified note-book as an inspired 
poem ; that, if he has any merit at all, it is 
merely as a satirist and a rhetorician. Less 
rabid critics call attention to the fact, that, 
after the strenuous Revolutionary period was 
over, Englishmen felt the need of calmer, 
more moral, and more artistic poetry, and 
that what was Tennyson's opportunity was 
naturally Byron's extremity. In a critical, 
neo-Alexandrian age, they say, the poet who 
wrote just as passion and impulse dictated 
can find no appreciative audience save among 
the semi-cultured. On the Continent the 
case is different, because foreigners are natur- 
ally blind to artistic defects that are patent to 
every Englishman, and Byron's force and 
passion can produce their legitimate effects 
unhindered, much as they did among our 
forefathers, who were living in a transitional 
poetic period, and were, moreover, dazzled 
by the fiery personality of the man. 

There can be little doubt that the moderate 
views just given contain much that is true. 
I will go further and say that they are prac- 
tically the grounds on which I rest my belief 
that no genuine revival of Byron will be 
possible among us for a long time to come. 
We are, as a rule, too sophisticated, too 
214 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

Alexandrian in our tastes, to enjoy greatly 
poetry that is thrown off at a white heat, save 
perhaps, for variety, the ballads with which 
Mr. Kipling has been favoring us. We pre- 
fer the artistic, the carefully wrought; and, 
even so, we do not desire that the poet's art 
should be as strenuous as it is in Paradise 
Lost. Until something stirs us up as a race, 
Byron is likely to be a favorite only with 
youths who are naturally passionate and with 
disillusioned men who can get pleasure out 
of wit and satire. 

But reasons that apply to the mass of 
readers do not necessarily apply to critics and 
men of more than ordinary culture. Such 
persons ought to be able to rid themselves, 
to some extent, of the prejudices of their own 
age and to fit themselves to enjoy genuine 
poetic merit of every sort. If it be true that 
Byron possessed a splendid personality, the 
force, the passion, the sincerity of which have 
been transmitted to his work, it is a sign of 
weakness when the cultured man of to-day 
fails to enjoy these qualities, because, for- 
sooth, he is offended by a false note here, a 
glaring patch of color there. There seems, 
too, to be an inherent weakness in our critical 
methods, if we can neglect, misunderstand, 
or treat with contempt a writer who was 
215 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

believed by his contemporaries to have dom- 
inated their age, and from whom foreigners 
have gathered Hterary inspiration for nearly 
a century. In other words, while there may 
be good reason to believe that a popular 
reaction in Byron's favor is not to be looked 
for shortly, is there any reason to believe that 
a majority of our critics and men of culture 
must continue to keep their faces turned 
away from him, as seems to be the case at 
present? 

I am inclined to answer. No. Byron's 
case with the critics is by no means so hope- 
less as the comparative failure of Matthew 
Arnold's defence of him would seem to prove. 
This is, on the whole, an age in which criti- 
cism is in the hands of impressionists and 
scholars ; that is to say, most men who write 
about literary matters are critics of taste or 
critics of knowledge. Above these two 
classes, unifying and correlating their respec- 
tive qualities, are to be found the critics of 
judgment, who are naturally not numerous at 
any period. Matthew Arnold belonged to 
this last class ; and some of his judgments, 
particularly those relating to Byron and 
Shelley, were unintelligible to Mr. Swinburne 
and Mr. Saintsbury, among others, simply 
because, as critics of taste and of knowledge, 
216 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

respectively, they were better fitted to play the 
advocate than to judge. Now judgment has 
always characterized the Continental critics, 
especially the French, more than it has the 
English ; and when we find men like Taine, 
Elze, and Castelar practically agreeing in their 
estimates of Byron, it ought to make us pause. 
A cultivated taste means much; wide and 
accurate knowledge means much : but the 
impressionists and scholars have between them 
managed to get English criticism into an 
almost anarchical state ; and the time is prob- 
ably not far distant when the higher claims 
of the critics of judgment will be acknowledged 
with relief, even at the risk of the establish- 
ment of a dictatorial power like that of Dr. 
Johnson. Such a dogmatic reign as his will 
not, of course, be seen again ; but chaos at 
least will not be long tolerated. And when 
anarchy ends among the critics, Byron 
may come once more into favor, for the fol- 
lowing reasons, which I submit not as my 
own, — that would be presumptuous in view 
of what I have just written, — but as gathered 
by me from my reading of the critics, and 
tested by a recent reperusal of the whole of 
Byron's poetical work. 

Mr. Henley calls Byron the " voice-in-chief" 
of his generation ; and such was the opinion 
217 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

of contemporaries like Sir Walter Scott and 
Shelley. Hatred of established conventions, 
political, religious, and social ; love for nature 
in her wilder aspects ; romantic fervor in per- 
sonal attachments; lack of reticence in the 
expression of emotions, — in short, a fervid 
individualism, may be said to have been the 
leavening characteristics of the age ; and they 
plainly received their fullest utterance in 
Byron's poetry. He may, therefore, be called 
legitimately the poet of an age; but we 
should not pay him the honors due to this high 
class of poets until we have measured him 
with Dante or Shakspere or Milton, and 
determined whether he is also a poet for all 
time. His present obscuration does not 
absolve us from this comparison ; for there 
have been times when even Dante's fame has 
been somewhat obscured in Italy. 

The immediate effects of such a compari- 
son cannot but be disastrous to Byron. He 
has not the high moral earnestness of Dante 
or Milton ; he has not their intellectual scope ; 
he has not their invariably perfect style. 
Whether as man or poet, he is at once seen 
to be far their inferior ; and, if we were to 
confine our attention to his conduct or to 
his marvellously erratic judgments about men 
and books, it would seem to be an imperti- 
218 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

nence to mention his name along with those 
of such consummate masters. Yet he voiced 
the best of his age, and possessed a person- 
ality of transcendent force. Are we, there- 
fore, quite sure that the comparison we are 
instituting is unnecessary? Have we not 
omitted to consider some essential element? 

We have. The great poets, *' not of an 
age, but for all time," have all left master- 
pieces in which their genius nas taken a long 
and sustained flight, — masterpieces each in 
its way unapproachable. Has Byron left any 
such? He has, in Don Juan, and its pen- 
dants, Beppo and The Vision of Judgment. 
These great poems are, to be sure, vastly 
inferior to The Divine Comedy, Othello, 
and Paradise Lost; but Don Juan, at least, 
is akin to them in being a work of sus- 
tained poetic imagination, perfect of its sort, 
unapproachable, and perennially fresh. It 
voices its author and his age ; it is sui generis, 
the greatest of humorous epics, couched in a 
style that could not be changed except for 
the worse, and unique in its combination of 
wit, humor, and satire with a genuine and 
rich vein of romantic and descriptive poetry. 
It is, in my opinion, the single sustained 
work of poetic imagination produced in nine- 
teenth-century England that keeps a level 
219 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

flight, the only one written in a style and 
verse-form as absolutely appropriated by its 
author as English blank verse is by Milton, 
the Latin hexameter by Virgil, and the 
Romantic Alexandrine by Victor Hugo. I 
will go further and say that, to me at least, 
it is the single long poem in English since 
Paradise Lost that grows fresher with each 
reading and chat gives me the sense of 
being in the presence of a spirit of almost 
boundless capacity. If this spirit does not 
soar into the heaven of heavens, it at least 
never falls to earth (save from the point of 
view of morals), but preserves a strong and 
middle flight. 

What has just been claimed for Don 
Juan is practically what many critics have 
seen and said ; but they have not, as a rule, 
made sufficient use of Byron's masterpiece to 
connect him with the great world-poets on 
the one hand, or to separate him, on the 
other, from his English contemporaries and 
successors. Elze, indeed, has placed him in 
a supreme position as representing '' lyrical 
verse conceived in its widest sense as subjec- 
tive poetry" ("die Lyrik im weitesten Sinne 
als subjective Poesie aufgefasst ") ; but this 
is a rather dangerous stand to take, both 
because the great world-poets have not won 
220 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

their position by their lyrical work, and be- 
cause Byron's lyrical efforts, whether in a 
technical or a broader sense, are often so 
faulty that to proclaim him as a supreme lyr- 
ist is practically to assert that he was a great 
poet because he was a great personality. It 
is safer to argue that the poets of the highest 
class are always represented by sustained 
masterpieces, and that Don Juan is suffi- 
ciently such a work to warrant our placing 
its author, who also voiced the aspirations of 
his age and was a tremendous personality, 
among the world-poets, but beneath them 
all in rank. 

Applying now this " masterpiece " test to 
the much-disputed question of Byron's rela- 
tive position among the English poets of this 
century, we must perhaps conclude that even 
Matthew Arnold has not made sufficient use 
of it. He has had a discerning eye for the 
beauty and value of the poetical passages 
scattered profusely through Byron's works, 
just as he has had for the similar passages in 
Wordsworth; but he has seemingly failed to 
consider architectonics, and has thus given 
the palm to Wordsworth on the just score of 
the superior quality of the latter's work when 
at its best. But where is Wordsworth's in- 
disputable sustained masterpiece? Even the 

221 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

Ode on the Intimations of Immortality 
has serious competitors, and, with all its 
beauty and power, does not connect its 
author with the world-poets. The Excur- 
sion has not won its way in England yet, 
much less on the Continent ; and he would be 
a rash Wordsworthian who should assert that 
it ever will. And what have Keats and Cole- 
ridge to show in the way of masterpieces, 
such as we are considering? What has 
Shelley, whose Prometheus Unbound and 
The Cenci, though in some respects won- 
derful, are neither fully unique nor represen- 
tative? As for the Idylls of the King and 
The Ring and the Book, one can merely 
say that they are still under the fire of the 
critics, and that the former, at least, is not 
likely to be pronounced unique or masterful, 
except by persons who know little about 
other heroic poetry. 

According to the above reasoning, if the 
serried hosts of the partisans of other poets 
will allow the word to pass, it would seem 
that Byron is connected with the world-poets 
in three respects : he has written a sustained 
masterpiece ; he is a representative character 
who has been accepted by the world at large ; 
and he possesses a tremendously powerful 
personality. No other modern Enghshman 

. 222 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

is so connected with the world-poets ; but 
Byron himself falls below them in respect to 
the inferior nature of his masterpiece and of 
his own moral, intellectual and artistic quali- 
fications. Yet there is also another, though 
a secondary, feature of his work that binds 
him to the masters, and distinguishes him 
from most of his contemporaries and suc- 
cessors — I mean the wide scope taken by 
his versatility. A discussion of this point 
will naturally lead us to take a rapid survey 
of his entire poetical achievement. 

Passing over the Hours of Idleness, it is 
to be noted that as early as 1808 Byron was 
capable of a fine lyric. When We Two 
Parted dates from this year, and breathes a 
spirit of passionate sorrow hardly equalled in 
literature ; yet the major part of the lyrics of 
this and the next few years cannot be said to 
be of a high order. There are some good 
occasional verses, and Maid of Athens, I 
Enter thy Garden of Roses, There be None 
of Beauty's Daughters, rank very high ; the 
last-named being fully worthy of Shelley at 
his best: but, although the general level of 
the Hours of Idleness is surpassed, no 
solid foundation for fame has yet been laid, 
even if the verve of the English Bards be 
taken into account. In 18 12 the stanzas to 
223 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

Thyrza, beginning, " And thou art dead, as 
young and fair," showed what Byron might 
do in the elegy if he had a mind ; and in 1815 
the Hebrew Melodies, with their one su- 
preme lyric (She Walks in Beauty), and 
at least three admirable songs, gave any one 
the right to expect great things of him as a 
lyrist. A little later his domestic troubles 
occasioned the writing of Fare Thee Well, 
and the three poems addressed to Augusta; 
but, after the later cantos of Childe Harold, 
the dramas, the final tales, and Don Juan 
began to occupy his mind, lyrical work be- 
came a matter of minor importance. He did 
not eschew it, of course ; for Manfred and 
other dramatic poems required it ; and here 
and there he wrote an excellent, though 
hardly a perfect, song. Even in Don Juan he 
made room for the eloquent Isles of Greece ; 
and at Missolonghi itself he composed 
those stanzas on his thirty-sixth birthday 
which will be forgotten only when men cease 
to remember the nobly pathetic death that 
soon after befell him. 

Taken in its totality, his lyric work must 
rank far below that of Shelley and Burns, to 
name no others ; but it requires little critical 
discernment to perceive that he was capable 
of pushing any of his rivals close, if he had 
224 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

cared to put forth his full powers. It is idle 
to affirm that the man who wrote some of 
the doggerel in Heaven and Earth could 
never have been a true lyrist. The aberra- 
tions of men of genius, even of almost con- 
summate artists, are not to be accounted for; 
and there are things perilously near doggerel 
in the mature work of poets like Shelley and 
Tennyson. Byron's aberrations in the matter 
of bad lyrical work are probably more dis- 
tressing than those of any other great poet; 
but they are to be accounted for rather by 
the restlessness of his temperament than by 
his native incapacity to write a true song. 
He was much besides a lyric poet; but in 
gauging his versatility we must not over- 
look his undeveloped, but genuine, gift for 
singing, nor the absolute worth of at least a 
score of his lyrics. 

Byron's contemporary fame took firm root 
with the publication of the first two cantos 
of Childe Harold in 1812. It is difficult 
now to understand how he could *' awake 
and find himself famous " for such far from 
supreme work ; but we must remember that 
people had had time to grow somewhat 
weary of Sir Walter's metrical romances of 
Scotland, and that the day had not come 
for popular appreciation of Wordsworth. 
15 225 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

And the first cantos of Harold, with all 
their affectations and imperfections, have 
many decided merits which are still visible 
in this day of reaction against them. The 
invocation to the second canto, and such 
passages as that beginning, ** Fair Greece, 
sad reHc of departed worth," will attract 
readers long after Mr. Swinburne's contemp- 
tuous depreciation of the entire poem shall 
have been forgotten. Besides there is in 
them a foreshadowing of the descriptive power 
that was to make the third and fourth cantos 
memorable. In short, although Byron needed 
to work off his crude energies in the Eastern 
tales, to be disgusted with the licentious 
and frivolous society of the Regency, and to 
be stirred to the depths by his domestic 
troubles, before his genius could be fully 
roused, there were abundant signs of the 
existence of that genius from the moment 
that Scott, with a prudent magnanimity, ab- 
dicated the throne of verse in his favor. 

The Eastern tales that followed in quick 
succession, The Giaour, The Bride of 
Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara natur- 
ally increased his reputation, because they 
were eminently readable and because they 
seemed to be partly autobiographic. None 
knew what the wild young peer had done in 
226 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

the East ; therefore, every one read the tales 
and speculated. The Byronic hero became 
quite a social personage, — a fact which has 
since led to not a little depreciation of this 
portion of the poet's works. We are. now 
told that The Giaour is the only one of 
the early tales possessing a spark of life ; and, 
while this is an exaggeration, it is impossible 
to deny that it was a good thing for Byron's 
fame when, by rapid working, he exhausted 
his Eastern vein. The Bride and The 
Corsair, however, contain several passages 
of imperishable beauty; and, much as the 
mystery and gloom of Lara may be out 
of fashion, it is hardly fair to deny the power 
and the literary influence of that romance in 
the couplets of Pope. And besides the 
poetical passages, there was a vigor of nar- 
ration that somewhat made up for the marked 
poverty of characterization, and that pre- 
luded the more successful later tales and the 
supreme achievement of Don Juan. In- 
deed, Byron must have felt that he had a 
faculty for narration, since he wrote The 
Island as late as 1823. 

The Siege of Corinth and Parisina ap- 
peared shortly after his marriage ; while 
The Prisoner of Chillon and Mazeppa date 
respectively from 1816 and 181 8. His men- 
22 7 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

tal and artistic growth was distinctly revealed 
in these pieces, the third of which has be- 
come classical. Although The Siege ends 
badly and contains much crude work, it is 
memorable for its descriptive strength; and 
there are some passages and scenes in both 
Parisina and Mazeppa that will perish 
only with the language. Even The Island, 
which has been declared to be a total failure 
by so well disposed a critic as Mr. J. A. 
Symonds, is such only in the first canto. It 
manages to throw a kind of Chateaubriand 
glamour over the South Sea Islands, and 
proves that, even after its author's hand had 
become subdued to the far from sentimental 
materials of Don Juan, it had not entirely 
lost its early cunning in romantic narrative. 
We must, therefore, conclude, in despite of 
the critics, that Byron's tales count for some- 
thing in his life-work, and are another proof 
of his wonderful versatility. 

It is worth while to note, that, just as the 
unfairness of his early critics stimulated Byron 
to achieve the first stage of his fame, so the 
clamors of society against him after his rup- 
ture with his wife incited him to the still higher 
achievement represented by the third and 
fourth cantos of Childe Harold. The 
poet has now practically become another 
228 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

man, and has transported his readers to a 
new world. His intellectual grasp has be- 
come firmer and larger; his artistic powers 
have been strengthened and chastened, though 
not to the height of perfection ; and his emo- 
tions and passions have been keyed to a point 
of intensity almost unparalleled. The result is 
a series of marvellous passages, which need only 
structural unity to make them a great poem. 
The Spirit of Nature has seized hold upon 
him, not through the influence of Words- 
worth, as some suppose, but because of native 
propensity and enforced disgust with the 
world of men ; and he rises to the supreme 
heights of descriptive poetry. Some of his 
stanzas devoted to the Alps are fairly sublime 
with passion. Pie does not penetrate Nature, as 
Wordsworth does : he appropriates her. And 
he almost manages to move without tripping 
over the fields of history and criticism, usu- 
ally so foreign to him. He can characterize 
Rousseau and Gibbon, can comprehend the 
past of Italy and Rome, and can fairly con- 
quer his normal ineptitude in matters of art. 
As for the noble and exquisite land in which 
he was to spend his exile, he almost appro- 
priates her as he does Nature. The Italy of 
Childe Harold, whatever artistic blemishes 
that poem may have, has dominated the 
229 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

world, certainly the English portion of it, in 
a manner not equalled by the subtler work 
of Landor or Shelley or Browning. It is this 
Italy that reappears in Parisina, in Bep- 
po, in The Lament of Tasso, in The 
Prophecy of Dante, in the Ode on Venice, 
in certain of the dramas — and lends charm 
to them all. The Lament of Tasso has, indeed, 
a power all its own that forestalls Browning 
and that makes one question why it is not 
more highly esteemed ; but The Two Fos- 
cari would be almost unreadable save for 
the passages that describe its hero's passion 
for Venice, loveliest of cities. 

We can now see that the later narrative and 
descriptive work not only furnishes fresh 
proof of Bryon's astonishing versatility, but 
would suffice, without Don Juan, to give 
its author a very high, though not the 
supreme position among the EngHsh poets 
of this century. But the entire dramatic 
section of his writings, including no less 
than eight lyrical dramas and tragedies, 
remains to be considered. 

It is usual to dismiss most of this work with 
positive contempt; but I, at least, must agree 
with Dr. Garnett in believing that Byron 
has, '' like Dryden, produced memorable 
works by force and flexibility of genius." I 
230 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

will go further and say, that, after having 
just re-read them all, I should prefer to begin 
immediately to read them over again to 
being forced to go through once more the 
entire dramatic work of Tennyson or Brown- 
ing. I am well aware that Byron's blank 
verse is often execrable, whether through his 
carelessness or his incapacity to handle that 
measure ; I know that only that precious 
product of open plunder, Werner, suc- 
ceeded on the stage ; I admit that Byron's 
genius was essentially non-dramatic, that his 
chief characters are not real persons, but 
ideal personages ; — I admit almost anything, 
in short, except the claim that the dramas 
are total, or nearly total, failures. Almost 
all carry interest; all show force and versa- 
tility; not one is lacking in passages of 
passion ; and at least three are, with all 
their faults, productions not to be matched 
in the works of any of Byron's modern rivals, 
save Shelley. These three are Manfred, 
Cain, and Sardanapalus, which may be 
set beside the Prometheus Unbound and 
The Cenci. The British critics have almost 
unanimously rendered their verdict in favor 
of Shelley ; and, from the point of view 
of technical art, they are doubtless in 
the right. Yet I question whether the sheer 
2; I 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

vigor of Byron does not balance the art of 
Shelley in a class of compositions in which 
neither could attain perfection. 

But, when the dramas have been added to 
the lyrical, narrative, and descriptive work, 
to vindicate Byron's claim to be considered 
the most versatile poetic genius of modern 
England, we are brought full upon the 
masterpiece which of itself alone might suf- 
fice to prove the truth of this claim, that 
wonderful Don Juan, almost the only mod- 
ern poem of which, adapting Shakspere, 
one may affirm that " age cannot wither 
it nor custom stale its infinite variety." 
I shall say little more about it, save to re- 
mark that its poetical passages have a richer 
tone than can easily be found elsewhere in 
Byron's own work or in that of his rivals, and 
that its fierce denunciation and irresistible 
ridicule of cant and tyranny ought to make 
it and its pendant, The Vision of Judg- 
ment, almost, if not quite, the master poems 
of modern democracy. Byron was a revolted 
aristocrat, it is true; but his acquired sym- 
pathy with democratic ideals, especially those 
of America, became a liberalizing force that 
can hardly be overpraised and should never 
be forgotten. We, at least, the countrymen 
of the Washington he extolled, should not be 
232 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

ungrateful to his memory ; and the advocates 
of peace among the nations should hail hirn 
as their most effective champion. 

But the reader may ask, What has become 
of the vicious, the irreligious Byron of our 
forefathers — the author of the blasphemous 
Cain and the licentious Don Juan, which 
no self-respecting man ought to read? An 
obvious answer to this question would be 
the statement that he never existed, save in 
the heated imaginations of his well-meaning, 
but unintelligent, countrymen. Such an 
answer, however, would smack partly of dis- 
ingenuousness. It is true that the ** monster 
of wickedness" never existed; but it is also 
true that Byron, by his conduct and his 
writings, sketched the outlines of a caricature 
which his countrymen had only to fill in. 
The high praise 1 have just given him as an 
apostle of liberty and peace is thoroughly 
deserved ; and he died a martyr for freedom ; 
but his life was in many important respects 
unworthy and low ; his character was soiled 
by traits of vulgarity and vice; and his writ- 
ings were often impure. Time has naturally 
softened us toward him ; and study of him 
and his age has convinced us that there was 
far more of good than of bad in him, that 
much extenuation can be found for his con- 
233 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

duct and the impurity of his writings : but, 
while we judge the man as leniently as we 
can, it would not be just to ourselves if we 
were to make as much allowance for his liter- 
ary work, the influence of which lives on. 
We may, indeed, easily dismiss the charge of 
blasphemy; for the word has various mean- 
ings at various periods and to various orders 
of intelligence. Byron did not mean to be 
blasphemous ; and his attitude toward Chris- 
tianity is at most wavering, not positively 
sceptical or defiant. To eschew his poetry 
on this account, in an age that tolerates Mrs. 
Humphry Ward, would be little short of 
ridiculous in any person of even semi-culture. 
The charge of impurity cannot be dis- 
missed so easily, although it would hardly 
be raised against a foreign writer. Some of 
his earliest verse was suppressed, on account 
of its sensual tone, by his kind friend, Mr. 
Beecher. In the lyrical and narrative work 
written before his marriage he kept this vein 
under, but did not manage, and probably did 
not wish, to hide its existence. In the better 
portions of Childe Harold, in the dramas, 
even in such later tales as Parisina, it would 
require a prying purist to find anything seri- 
ously objectionable. In Beppo and Don 
Juan, however, he gave himself a loose rein, 
234 



m 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

in spite of the importunities of La Guiccioli. 
He took delight in shocking the sense of 
propriet}/ of his countrymen, who had treated 
him witli injustice ; but, while his heartiest 
admirers cannot but wish that he had not 
gone so far, they find in this very fact not 
only an excuse for him, but a safe means of 
rescuing the two poems from the mass of por- 
nographic and lubricous literature. Certain 
scenes and passages of Don Juan are not 
deliberate efforts to corrupt: they are rather 
the ebullitions of a coarse, but thoroughly 
sincere, satirist, bent on shocking people he 
despises. The wit, the verve, the humor, the 
satire that are explicit or implicit in almost 
every stanza save Don Juan so as by fire. 

The London of the Regency naturally 
could not take this view of the matter, and 
sought to drown its own shame in the clamor 
that it raised over the alleged immorality of the 
new poem ; but choice and wholesome spirits, 
like Sir Walter Scott, saw that Byron had 
struck his true vein, and cheered him on. 
As the cantos proceeded, he held himself in 
more and more, so that much of the poem is 
practically unamenable to censure. And now 
that time has removed us as far from him as 
he was from Fielding, it would seem that 
only those who are peculiarly sensitive to the 
235 



THE BYRON REVIVAL 

coarse, and peculiarly insensitive to wit, need 
be warned away from the greatest master- 
piece of its kind in any literature. 

In short, just as an age that tolerates Mrs. 
Ward need not fear that Byron will sap its 
faith, so an age that reads without abhor- 
rence certain chapters in The Manxman, 
in Jude the Obscure, and in Evelyn 
Innes, cannot with consistency put Don 
Juan beyond the pale. Nor should an age 
that admires brilliant achievements of all 
kinds long withhold its praise from that won- 
derfully passionate, strong, and sincere soul 
which, after uttering itself in the master poem 
and poetry of a tremendous epoch, gave itself 
up a willing sacrifice to the cause of human 
freedom in the fatal marshes of Missolonghi. 



236 



VII 

TEACHING THE SPIRIT OF 
LITERATURE 



VII 

TEACHING THE SPIRIT OF 
LITERATURE. 

Readers of Balzac's Une Fille d'Eve will 
recall his description of the depressing edu- 
cation given by the Countess de Granville 
to her two young daughters. That she might 
make smooth their path to heaven and matri- 
mony, she subjected them to a regimen that 
had at least one fatal defect, in that it took no 
account of their emotions. Its results may 
be learned from the story, but few thoughtful 
readers will refrain from asking themselves 
whether our educational regimen is not in 
too many cases followed by results similar 
in kind, if not in degree. 

Parents and teachers of modern America 
have doubtless quite different ideals for their 
children from those of the Countess de Gran- 
ville, but they often make the mistake that 
she did of pursuing these ideals at the cost 
of their children's emotions; that is to say, at 
the cost of their real happiness. The ideals 
239 



1 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

of the French mother were summed up in 
the word convenance ; the ideals of too many 
American mothers and fathers, and, I regret 
to add, teachers, are summed up in the word 
*' utiHty." Neither set of ideals takes much 
account of those emotions which are the 
highest part of our nature, and are most 
impressionable in childhood ; for the world 
of the suitable and of the useful is the world 
of fact, and fact has to be transmuted by the 
imagination before it can reach and act upon 
the emotions. It follows, then, that every 
educational regimen which appeals to the 
mind through facts should be supplemented 
by one which appeals to the soul through 
ideas; that is, through facts transmuted by 
the imagination. Hence no educational sys- 
tem is complete that does not include instruc- 
tion in religion and art, the two chief sources 
of appeal to the emotions. For obvious 
reasons we Americans have been compelled 
to leave religion outside the ordinary school 
and college curriculum, and this is practically 
the case with the plastic arts. We are thus 
reduced to rely mainly on literature and 
music as sources of appeal to the emotions 
of our youth, but we have hitherto made 
insufficient use of both. 

This was not the case with the best edu- 
240 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

cated people the world has ever known, the 
Greeks. Literature, especially poetry, and 
music were the basis of a Greek boy's edu- 
cation, and education in these two arts (which 
it must be remembered were closely con- 
nected with rehgion) led to the culmination 
of all the other arts in the Athens of Pericles. 
But the Athens of Pericles had its weakness 
as well as its strength, and the world has 
moved fopward greatly in twenty-three hun- 
dred years ; hence the basis of a boy's edu- 
cation should be far broader now than it was 
then. Yet while broadening the base and 
shifting its centre, we sh'ould not be rash 
enough to cast away its old material. Poetry 
and music are still essential to any sound 
educational system ; and this being so, the 
inquiry how they may best be taught is of 
great interest, and, if confined to the first 
named, leads to the main topic of this 
paper. 

I use the term ''poetry" advisedly, for 
it best represents the literature of the imagi- 
nation, and that is what we have to deal with, 
as we shall see at once after a little analysis. 
What did the Greek teacher expect his 
pupils to get from their study of Homer? 
Probably two sets of good results ; one affect- 
ing the mind, the other the soul. From the 
i6 24! 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

Iliad and the Odyssey the Greek boy could 
derive much information with regard to 
mythology, genealogy, and so-called history. 
They served also as reading-books, and for 
a long while took the place of formal gram- 
mars and treatises on rhetoric. In other 
words, they were to him a storehouse of 
facts. But they also filled him with emotions 
of pleasure. They charmed his ear by their 
cadences ; they charmed his inner eye by 
their pictures ; they charmed his moral na- 
ture by the examples they offered him of sub- 
lime beauty and bravery and patriotism. In 
short, they were to him a storehouse of 
ideas; and this, in the eyes of his teacher, 
was doubtless their chief value. But nowa- 
days we need not use poetry as a storehouse 
of facts, and we need to use literature for 
this purpose only so far as a good style helps 
in the presentation of facts, as for example 
in the case of history. With our long list 
of sciences, natural and linguistic and moral, 
we are in no danger of ignoring the world 
of facts, and are therefore free to use litera- 
ture, especially poetry, in order to appeal to 
the emotions of youth. Hence, in inquiring 
how we may best teach literature, we are really 
inquiring how we may best teach the litera- 
ture of the imagination, — that is, poetry in 
242 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

a wide sense ; for it would seem that litera- 
ture used as a storehouse of facts might be 
taught like any other subject in the domain 
of fact. 

But some one may ask, While all this is 
true enough, what has it to do with the prac- 
tical teaching of literature? I answer that it 
has everything to do with it. If the chief 
reason for teaching literature be the fact that 
we shall thereby best appeal to the emotions, 
what is one to say of the amount of time 
given to the study of the history of literature, 
and to those critical, philological, and histori- 
cal annotations that fill most of our literary 
textbooks? The history of literature is im- 
portant enough, but it belongs to the domain 
of fact ; it does not appeal primarily to the 
emotions. It is well for a child to know the 
names of great books and their authors ; it 
is just as well that he should not say that 
Fielding wrote Tom Jones's Cabin or that 
Telemachus was a great French preacher of 
the seventeenth century, as I have known 
university students to do. But if the history 
of literature really appealed to the emotions, 
if it vitally affected any pupil, would he make 
such mistakes? The history of literature be- 
longs to the domain of fact just as much as 
geography does, and the ability on the jiart 
243 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

of a child to reel off the names of authors 
and their dates is just as useless as his ability 
to tell the capital of Bolivia or to draw a map 
of Afghanistan. A certain amount of infor- 
mation about books and writers is useful, — 
the amount given in Mr. Stopford Brooke's 
and Professor Richardson's primers and in 
Mr. Brander Matthews's volume on American 
literature, — but not a bit more ; for as in- 
tellectual training the history of literature is 
not nearly so efficient as many another 
study. 

But if teaching the history of literature be 
beside the mark, if we wish to reach the 
emotions, what are we to say of criticism ? I 
cannot see that we can say anything different. 
That pupil of mine who called Cowper's Hues 
on the receipt of his mother's picture out of 
Norfolk an *' ode " made an absurd mistake, but 
I am not at all sure that he would have been 
essentially better or happier if he had not 
made it. Critical appreciation is certainly 
better than uncritical, but, after all, apprecia- 
tion is the main thing, and must precede 
criticism. Just how much critical, philologi- 
cal, and historical elucidation is needed to 
make a poem intelligible — for of course it 
has to be apprehended intellectually before 
it can produce its full emotional effect — is a 
244 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

hard matter to decide, but I am sure that the 
amount varies with the ages of the pupils. 
The younger the pupils, the simpler and less 
numerous the teacher's comments should be ; 
for he has no right to be dealing with an ob- 
scure poem, and he must remember that he 
is not, or should not be, trying to teach his 
pupils facts. I am forced to conclude, then, 
that the common practice of putting into the 
hands of pupils a certain number of fully an- 
notated classics, with the understanding that 
the unfortunate pupils are to be examined on 
the numerous facts contained in the notes and 
introductions, whatever may be claimed for it 
by college associations or by the editors of 
such books, is not the very best way of using 
literature as an appeal to the emotions of the 
young. Criticism, philology, and history are 
admirable handmaids to literature, but they 
are not literature, and they will not help us 
much in an appeal to the emotions. To 
make this appeal we must bring pupils 
in contact with the body of literature, and 
here is the crucial point of the problem be- 
fore us. 

But is not this to play into the hands of 
men like the late Professor Freeman, who 
opposed the establishment of a Chair of Lit- 
erature at Oxford on the plea that we cannot 
245 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

examine on tastes and sympathies? If we are 
to make a minimum use of criticism, philo- 
logy, and history, what manner of examina- 
tion shall we be able to set our classes in 
literature? To this question Mr. Churton 
Collins replied that we ought to examine on 
Aristotle, Longinus, Quintilian, and Lessing; 
that is to say, on criticism. A very good an- 
swer so far as university students are con- 
cerned. The history and theory of literary 
composition, especially of poetry, should be 
included in every well-organized curriculum^ 
and any competent teacher can examine on 
them. But though these studies may chasten 
the emotions, they do not primarily appeal 
to or awaken them, and for the purposes of 
the elementary teacher they are almost use- 
less. Are such teachers, then, to be debarred 
from making use of those departments of Ht- 
erary study that admit of being tested by ex- 
amination? I answer. Yes, so far as their 
main work is concerned. A small amount 
of literary history may be required and pu- 
pils may be examined on it, and perhaps a 
tiny amount of criticism, but for the most 
part school classes in literature should go 
scot-free from examination. 

This will seem a hard saying to teachers 
enamored of school machinery, — - who teach 
246 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

by cut-and-dried methods, and regard the 
school-day as a clock face, with the recita- 
tion hours corresponding to the figures, and 
themselves and their pupils to the hands. 
But the hterary spirit and the mechanical 
spirit have long been sworn enemies, for 
machinery has no emotions ; so, for the pur- 
poses of this paper, we need hardly consider 
the mechanical teacher, who had best keep 
his hands off hterature. The born teacher, 
the teacher with a soul, — and I am optimist 
enough to believe that many of the men and 
women in this country who are wearing their 
lives away in the cause of education belong 
to this category, — will be glad to believe 
that there is at least one important study that 
need not and should not be pursued mechani- 
cally. The trouble will be not so much with 
the pupils and teachers as with the parents 
and statisticians, who want marks and grades, 
and that sort of partly necessary, partly hope- 
less thing. Now I have not the slightest idea 
how a child can be graded or marked on his 
emotions, yet I am sure that all teaching of 
literature that is worthy the name takes ac- 
count of these chiefly. If this be true, should 
we not be brave enough to let the machinery 
go, and confine ourselves to the one pertinent 
and eternal question, How young souls can 
247 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

be best brought in contact with the spirit of 
literature ? 

If I may judge from my experience with 
college work, covering several years, and 
from my briefer experience with school 
work, I am forced to the conclusion that 
sympathetic reading on the part of the 
teacher should be the main method of pre- 
senting literature, especially poetry, to 
young minds. I have never got good re- 
sults from the history of literature or from 
criticism except in the case of matured stu- 
dents, and I never expect to. I have exa- 
mined hundreds of papers in the endeavor to 
find out what facts or ideas connected with 
literature appeal most to the young, and I 
have found that in eight out of ten cases it 
is the trivial or the bizarre. I remember a 
curious instance in point. I had been using 
Gosse's History of Eighteenth Century Lit- 
erature, and I asked my class to give a brief 
account of the life of Alexander Pope. Judge 
of my astonishment when I found that three 
fourths of a large class had, without collusion, 
and no matter what the merits of the indivi- 
dual paper, copied verbatim the following 
sentence : '* Pope, with features carved as if 
in ivory, and with the great melting eyes of 
an antelope, carried his brilliant head on a 
248 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

deformed and sickly body." Fortunately, In 
this case the trivial facts retained were rightly 
applied. In another case I was gravely in- 
formed that the poet Collins died " of a 
silk-bag shop," information that completely 
staggered me until I found that Mr. Gosse, 
innocent of any intention to mislead, had 
stated that Sterne died in *' lodgings over 
a silk-bag shop." I need hardly cite further 
examples of utter and ridiculous confusion of 
names, for such examples are familiar to all 
teachers of experience. What I need to 
point out is that these mistakes are due, not 
to the stupidity of our pupils or to our own 
bad teaching, but to the fact that the history 
of literature is drier than mineralogy to any 
one who is not already fairly well read. 
Much the same thing may be said of criti- 
cism, only the chances of making mistakes 
are magnified through the elusive nature of 
the subject. It is well, certainly, to give a 
child some interesting information about 
great authors, and to try to teach him the 
distinctions between the broader categories 
of literature ; but after this it seems to me 
that the primary and secondary teachers 
should rely mainly upon sympathetic read- 
ing. Certainly this is my experience with 
younger students. Whenever I find their at- 
249 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

tention flagging, I begin to read, and make 
my comments as brief as possible. In this 
way I have reached men who seemed at first 
sight to be hopeless. My most signal suc- 
cess was when I involuntarily set a baseball 
pitcher to committing certain sonnets of 
Shakspere to memory, while he was rest- 
ing from practising new curves. I have al- 
ways been proud of that achievement, but I 
believe it would be a by no means unusual 
one if teachers generally would criticise less 
and read more. The teacher must, of course, 
read sympathetically, or the result will be 
far from good. He must read with sincerity 
and enthusiasm and understanding, and with 
critical judgment. To try Browning's Red 
Cotton Night-Cap Country on a class of 
freshmen would be simply silly. To abstain 
from reading Byron to them on account of 
Mr. Saintsbury's recent utterances on the 
subject of his lordship's poetry would be 
equally silly. But there is, fortunately, a 
large amount of English and American po- 
etry that is both noble and suitable to the 
comprehension of young minds. Where 
Emerson's Brahma will prove incompre- 
hensible, his Concord Hymn . will stir 
genuinely patriotic emotions. 

It will be perceived that I am throwing a 
250 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

great deal of responsibility on the teacher; 
and I think this is right, for the emotions of 
his pupils are like the strings of an instru- 
ment which he is to touch into life. After a 
while his intermediation will become less 
necessary, but at first it is essential in most 
cases. In spite of what many critics say, it 
is a fact that with a majority of children 
whatever literary appreciation they may have 
lies dormant until it is awakened by some 
skilful hand. It is better that this hand 
should be the teacher's, if only for the reason 
that the performance of such a service will 
add a pleasure to many a life wearied with 
the daily rounds of mechanical duty. I am 
sure that there is no teacher, man or woman, 
who would not be glad to have a half-hour 
set apart in each school-day in which arith- 
metics and grammars could be laid aside, 
and some favorite volume of poetry brought 
out from the desk and read with sympathy 
and enthusiasm. If I had a private school of 
my own, I should surely snatch the time for 
this, even if I had to have fewer maps drawn 
and fewer examples in partial payments 
worked. By the power of music Amphion 
built the walls of Thebes ; by the power of 
poetic harmony we can try to build up the 
characters of our pupils. ** What passion can- 
251 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

not music raise and quell? '* asked Dryden, 
and we may ask the same question with re- 
gard to poetry. I have so much belief in 
the power of the *' concord of sweet sounds " 
that I am incHned to say that many pupils 
will receive benefit from merely hearing great 
poetry read, even though it may not convey 
much meaning to their minds. Take, for 
example, this magnificent passage from 
Lycidas : 

" Ay me ! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas 
Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled, 
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, 
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide 
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world ; 
Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, 
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old. 
Where the great vision of the guarded mount 
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold ; 
Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth, 
And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth." 

For the elucidation of these eleven lines I 
felt compelled to give recently nearly three 
pages of notes, over one page being con- 
cerned with the single word " Angel." Nov/ 
I do not believe that the average schoolboy 
would have any clear notion as to who this 
Angel was, or as to what Bellerus or Naman- 
cos meant, but I think that the noble picture 
of the corpse of Lycidas washed by the 

4 



\ 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

sounding seas would appeal profoundly to 
his imagination, and that he would be the 
better for having heard his teacher read the 
lines. That he would be the better for nine 
out of ten of the critical and philological an- 
notations that editors are constrained to make 
on the passage I see grave reason to doubt. 
The fact is that we have let the teacher of the 
Greek and Latin classics affect us by methods 
of minute analysis better fitted to the study 
of a dead than of a living language. These 
same classical teachers have, too, not a little 
to answer for, on account of the slight which 
time out of mind they have put on the purely 
literary side of their work. How many 
teachers of Latin, when reading Virgil, stop 
to comment on the sonorous quality of such 
a grand verse as 

" Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem," 
or upon this verse of Horace's, 

" Cras ingens iterabimus aequor," 

which suggests comparison at once with 
Shakspere's " multitudinous seas/' or with 
Matthew Arnold's 

"The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea " .? 

But the mention of Arnold reminds me 
that the stress I am laying on sympathetic 
253 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

reading of poetry by the teacher is merely 
an amplification of his advice that we should 
keep passages of great poetry in our minds, 
to serve as touchstones (perhaps tuning-forks 
would be a more accurate though less elegant 
metaphor) that will enable us to detect the 
presence or absence of truly poetic qualities 
in the verse we read. I should add also that 
this method of study is strictly in Hne with 
the best modern ideas ; for pupils should be 
put in touch with a subject as a whole before 
they are set to studying its parts. 

There are many other things that I should 
like to say, did space permit. I should like 
to protest against the use of great literature 
for exercises in parsing or for etymological 
or philological investigations ; it ought even 
to be sparingly used for the purposes of read- 
ing-classes. I should like to protest against 
the lack of judgment shown by teachers and 
college professors in the texts they assign for 
study, — two books of Pope's Iliad, for exam- 
ple, in place of his Rape of the Lock, — 
a matter, however, in which we teachers of 
English are so far ahead of our friends who 
teach French and German that perhaps I 
ought to be thankful for the progress we 
have made. I should like finally to insist 
upon what I believe will some day be gen- 
254 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

erally recognized, — the supremacy of litera- 
ture as a study over all others that now 
occupy the world's attention. For when 
everything is said, it is literature, and espe- 
cially poetry, that has the first and the un- 
disputed right to enter the audience-chamber 
of the human soul. Painting, sculpture, 
music, the whole noble Hst of the sciences, 
the lower but still important useful arts, may 
and must continue to appeal and minister to 
the spirit of man ; but artistic prose and 
poetry are the servants, — nay, are they not 
rather the masters? — on which that spirit 
has relied from the beginning of time, and 
on which it will rely till time itself shall 
end. 



255 



I 



VIII 
MR. HOWELLS AND ROMANTICISM 



17 257 



VIII 

MR. HOWELLS AND ROMAN- 
TICISM 

Mr. William Dean Howells recently had 
occasion to speak a good word for the fiction 
that is being produced in our Southern 
States, but he prefaced his remarks by some 
uncomplimentary references to romantic fic- 
tion and to the Southern novelists, like Simms, 
Kennedy, and Esten Cooke, that wrote it. 
His exact words were : *' I know that there 
were before the war novelists in South Caro- 
lina, in Maryland, and in Virginia deeply 
imbued with what our poor Spanish friends 
call the Walter-Scottismo, not to say the 
Fenimore-Cooperismo, of an outdated fashion 
of the world's fiction. But I have never read 
one of their books, and I should be able to 
say what they were like only at second hand." 
It was extremely proper for Mr. Howells 
to refrain from discussing Simms, Kennedy, 
and Cooke, since he confessedly knows 
nothing about them, but was it proper for 
259 



ROMANTICISM 

him to refer to them in quite the tone he 
used? Mr. Howells is too true a man to be 
arrogant, but sometimes his criticism is so 
aggressively modern that it falls little short 
of arrogance. There is surely no need of 
speaking of the fiction of sixty years ago as 
one would of a worn-out coat. It may be 
old-fashioned, but literary as well as other 
fashions are known to revive, and the material 
of a novel, which is human nature, does not 
unravel or become moth-eaten as the material 
of a coat does. Besides, no one wears an 
old coat who is not obliged to, while thou- 
sands of quite intelligent people still enjoy 
and read the romances their fathers read, and 
a whole school of writers has arisen whose 
aim is to break away from the realistic fiction 
Mr. Howells writes and advocates. 

I am not at all disposed to blame Mr. 
Howells for praising the fiction he likes ; all 
I claim is that it is uncatholic in him not to 
have a good word to say for writers who 
endeavored to do for their day what he is 
doing so well for his. His canon of criticism 
seems to be that what pleases the present is 
all a man need consider ; quite as sure, if not 
a surer canon would be that there is some 
good in whatever has thoroughly pleased the 
bygone generations of men. Then, again, 
260 



ROMANTICISM 

if there is any truth in the theory of evolution, 
the fiction of to-day must have been evolved 
out of the fiction of yesterday ; hence the 
latter can hardly be foolish if the former be 
good, and present-day writers ought at least 
to cultivate the virtue of gratitude. 

But is there any reason why a person who 
can enjoy as I have just done Mr. Howells's 
delightful Story of a Play should not be 
able to read with pleasure, as I did long 
since Simms's Eutaw, Kennedy's Horse-Shoe 
Robinson and Cooke's Virginia Comedians? 
Perhaps there is one rather effective reason, 
the fact that many people have an im- 
perfect sympathy with the past. This is 
one of the chief reasons why such a poem 
as Paradise Lost is so little read to-day; 
but would it not be foolish to argue 
that great poem's worthlessness from its 
paucity of readers? Mr. Howells, of course, 
does not argue at all about the worthlessness of 
ante bellum Southern fiction, but the way in 
which he passes it over suggests that if he 
did argue, his argument would be based upon 
the inapplicability of that fiction to present 
conditions — which is tantamount to ignoring 
the fact that it is possible to get a great deal 
of pleasure out of any good artistic product 
of the past if we can put ourselves in touch 
261 



ROMANTICISM 

with it. But that thousands of people can 
do this is a matter of every-day experience, 
hence it would be more becoming in the 
friends of realism to acknowledge with 
Horatio — for that gentleman was doubtless 
wise enough to agree with Hamlet — that 
there are more things than are dreamed of 
in their philosophy. There are some good 
things, however, in Mr. Howells's philosophy, 
and I shall now try to show what these are. 

When Mr. Howells, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, endeavors to divert readers from 
the older romances, he shows himself, I 
think, to be an uncatholic critic ; but in so 
far as his remarks affect latter-day writers, 
they seem to me to be altogether admirable. 
There can be no question that the art of fiction 
has developed ; there is equally no question 
that those who write it to-day ought to be 
abreast of the art they practise. The realistic 
work of Balzac, Flaubert, Daudet, Zola, Tol- 
stoi, Hardy and Howells has made it impossi- 
ble for readers, not in fair sympathy with the 
past, to tolerate much of the crude work of 
sixty years ago. This is as it should be, and 
if the art of fiction develop, the writers of 
realistic fiction who are the masters to-day will 
be left behind in their turn, except in the case 
of such comprehensive geniuses as Balzac. 
262 



ROMANTICISM 

But if this be true, are not writers wast- 
ing their time, if, in revolt against present 
methods, they throw themselves back upon 
past methods without having profited from 
the teachings of contemporary masters? 
They may gain readers, of course, and if 
they have no other end in view their revolt 
is justified ; but if they are conscientious 
artists, are they not making a mistake? For 
example, what permanent place in literature 
can the increasing swarm of men and women 
who are imitating Mr. Stanley Weyman 
expect to have ? They have profited a little 
in point of style from the later masters, their 
knowledge of history and archaeology is 
greater than that of the romancers of two 
generations ago, but they surely do not in 
most cases succeed in keeping their books 
from being mere tours de force. Almost 
every day a new historical romance comes 
to my table — now the scene is laid in the 
Italy of the fourteenth century, now in the 
France of the thirteenth ; now it is in Wales, 
now in the Faroe Islands. Nearly always 
the story is told by the chief actor, who has 
hairbreadth escapes in plenty — in which 
neither author nor reader ought normally 
to take much interest, for they seem to be 
utterly factitious. How much more good 
263 



ROMANTICISM 

these authors would be doing if they would 
only write as well as they could about the 
life around them. 

The early romancers did not do this, to be 
sure, but they did do something their modern 
imitators cannot do — they breathed the 
spirit of romance, which was in the air of 
their times, into their souls and practically 
lived by it. The romantic thus became al- 
most the real to them, and hence their works 
represented them truly. But there is no 
genuine spirit of romanticism abroad to-day ; 
life was never more real and strenuous and 
earnest ; hence our latter-day romancers do 
not give out what they breathe in. Their 
romanticism is artificial, factitious ; it is the 
product of a literary fad which is itself the 
product of a premature literary revolt. Cer- 
tainly realism when it passed into naturalism 
went too far and a revolt was needed ; but it 
seems a pity that the revolters should not 
have gone back to sound realism and made a 
new departure from it. Men who have lost 
their way try to strike their path again at the 
point of divergence ; they do not make for a 
deserted camp and pursue a backward trail 
therefrom. But this is just what our recent 
romancers have been doing, and if in any 
way Mr. Howells's criticisms can show them 
264 



ROMANTICISM 

the folly of their course I trust that every 
word he writes will be seriously pondered. 
What I have just been saying will receive con- 
siderable illustration from a cursory examina- 
tion of one of the most delightful books of 
Daudet — his autobiographic romance, Le 
Petit Chose (Little What 's-His-Name). The 
first part of this story is realistic in the 
best sense of the term ; that is, it sticks close 
to the facts of experience while treating them 
in an idealistic way. Mere realism, not shot 
through with idealism, soon degenerates into 
naturalism, and is as unpleasant as an entirely 
unideal character is in real life. It was al- 
ways impossible for Daudet to write without 
idealizing, but in the first part of Le Petit 
Chose his ideal picture of his boyhood was 
a true picture, which lost nothing by being 
pure at the same time. 

In the second part of his story, however, 
while not ceasing to be idealistic, he did 
cease to be realistic and became romantic in 
a high degree. He left the facts of experi- 
ence behind, with the result that his story 
lost both force and charm. He failed to 
give a picture of Bohemian Paris that would 
at all compare with those of Balzac or even 
with those which he himself gave later. He 
weakened his leading character and made the 

265 



ROMANTICrSM 

others either pathetic or commonplace. And 
all this resulted from the fact that when he 
ceased to rely upon his personal experiences, 
his feet ceased to rest upon the solid ground, 
and he began flitting like a pretty butterfly. 
If he had written a generation earlier, we 
should not have felt the weakness, for his 
story would have been all of a piece, and 
would have represented the best he had to 
give. Writing in 1868, however, he failed 
to profit by the example set by Balzac, and 
it was some time before he realized his 
mistake. 

This book of Daudet's, then, illustrates 
admirably the fact that in an unromantic age 
it is useless to attempt to depart from the 
canons of true realism. These canons de- 
manded that Daudet should keep his eye on 
both real and ideal life, and that he should 
not write merely a pretty and pathetic story 
ending in a happy marriage literally forced 
upon a ne'er-do-well by the singularly impru- 
dent father of a much forgiving damsel. 
Later in his life, Daudet, having learned the 
value of true realism, regretted that he had 
written Le Petit Chose, for he felt that he 
could have turned his youthful experiences 
to better account. Perhaps he was wrong in 
this ; at least, it is certain that the first half, 
266 



ROMANTICISM 

in which he did not aim at romantic effects, 
is one of the most perfect descriptions of the 
checkered experience of a child and youth 
that can be found in literature. And it has 
these merits because it is true to facts rather 
than to mere desires. The romancer consults 
desires, and so builds air castles in which the 
active men and women of to-day do not care 
to tarry. The naturalist, forgetting the ideal, 
is only too likely to construct sties in which 
no clean-minded person will feel comfortable 
for a moment. The true realist builds a solid 
and substantial house in which the intelli- 
gent reader delights to linger. Thus we per- 
ceive that when Mr. Howells praises realism 
he is doing all writers of fiction a service, al- 
though we need not, as readers, agree with 
his slighting remarks with regard to the 
romances that delighted our grandfathers. 



267 



IX 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET ONCE 
MORE 



269 



IX 

TENNYSON AND MUSSET 
ONCE MORE. 

I HAD just ceased reading, a few weeks since, 
the interesting but rather bulky volumes 
which the present Lord Tennyson has de- 
voted to the memory of his distinguished 
father, when chance led me to examine in 
succession two yellow-backed books pub- 
lished this year in Paris (1897). They were 
M. Paul Marieton's Une Histoire d'Amour 
and the letters of George Sand to Alfred de 
Musset and to Ste. Beuve, with an intro- 
duction by M. S. Rocheblave. No contrast 
could have been greater than that afforded 
by the severe restraint of the Tennyson 
memoir and the utter abandon of the two 
latest contributions to the history of the most 
famous love affair of the nineteenth century. 
The impulse to draw a sort of Plutarchian 
parallel was almost irresistible, and equally 
potent was the desire to read once more 
Taine's well-known comparison of Tennyson 
271 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

and Musset in the last chapter of his His- 
toire de la Litterature Anglaise. 

We all remember how Taine contrasted 
the two poets and the respective publics for 
which they wrote, and we recall the impres- 
sionist note with which he closed what he 
tried to make a rigidly scientific work — *' but 
I prefer Alfred de Musset." We can most of 
us probably, if we were under Tennyson's in- 
fluence when we read these words — and who 
of us was not in those golden days? — re- 
member the fine scorn we felt for the French- 
man who had the audacity to maintain that 
his country, land of broken-backed Alexan- 
drines as it was, had produced a poet worthy 
of being mentioned in the same breath with 
the author of QEnone, Maud, and Elaine. 
This fine scorn which we felt then has 
lingered on with some people, and actu- 
ally intrudes itself into the appendix to 
the second volume of the Tennyson memoir, 
where the late Professor Palgrave permitted 
himself to speak of M. Taine as a " lively 
critic." But to those of us who have been 
allowed to see the error of our way through 
our reading of Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, and 
Musset himself, who have learned to our sur- 
prise that much of what our teachers had 
told us about the insufficiency of the French 
272 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

language to the expression of high poetic 
thought and sentiment was due to mere ig- 
norance on their part, a doubt has perhaps 
come more than once whether Taine was not 
partly justified in his preference for Musset 
over Tennyson — a doubt which the perusal 
of the four volumes named above does not 
altogether allay. For from contrasting the 
lives of the two poets, one proceeds inevi- 
tably to the weighiag and contrasting of 
their works. 

With regard to the memoir of Tennyson 
little need be said. Since its appearance in 
October last there has been no such person- 
age as an " indolent reviewer " to be found 
in the land. The critics seem to have gone 
down like ninepins before it, and they are 
still lying in a state of prostrate and hardly 
becoming adulation. Could the Laureate 
have foreseen their postures, he would prob- 
ably have burned more letters than he did, 
and would have been still more determined 
to have his poem, The Gleam, received as 
the sole authorized memorial of his life. The 
gift of prescience was not his, however, and 
so we are left to wonder whether the reading 
world of a hundred years from now will really 
peruse with rapture the letters of Queen Vic- 
toria, the reminiscences of Mr. Tyndall and 
i8 273 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

other famous contemporaries, the mere social 
notes of Mr. Lowell and his peers, the ex- 
tracts from private diaries, that make up a 
large portion of these volumes which the 
critics have already placed by the side of 
Boswell's Johnson. But whatever our con- 
clusions as to the mortality or immortality of 
this memoir in its present bulky shape, we 
should surely be blind if we failed to recog- 
nize the essential nobility of the Hfe por- 
trayed. The man whom the English have 
been extolling, while their French neighbors 
have been picking his great rival to pieces, 
was obviously a noble and conscientious 
artist in verse, a poet fully impressed with 
the sacred nature of his calling, a critic of 
remarkably acute powers, a widely read and 
observant student of nature and of men, an 
intensely spiritual seeker after God, a loyal 
patriot and friend — in short, an ideal char- 
acter of a high and attractive type. 

Such was the man — except perhaps in his 
role of critic — that had stood out behind the 
Poems ; such is the man that stands out be- 
hind the Biography. But neither the poetry 
nor the memoir proves Tennyson to have 
been the profound seer that Mr. Gladstone 
and other contemporaries thought him, nor 
does either source of information disprove 
274 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

the charge that he was morbidly sensitive, 
and hence unable to give full expression 
to the lyric passion that was a fundamental 
constituent of his nature. It is in view of this 
charge that the destruction of the letters to 
Arthur Hallam and to Miss Sellwood before 
she became Lady Tennyson is so much to be 
regretted. Whatever the admirers of Maud 
may say, the Tennyson that we know through 
his poems after 1842 and through the memoir 
is rather the poet of idyll, elegy, and artificial 
epic than the poet of lyrical passion, whether 
of love or grief. That he was profoundly 
passionate we have reason to believe from 
the evidence of friends, from some of the early 
poems — perhaps FitzGerald's well-known in- 
ability to appreciate fully the later poems came 
from his missing the adequate expression of 
this passion, and not from the fact, ungener- 
ously urged by the present Lord Tennyson, 
that he did not see the faulted verses in 
manuscript — and from lyric outbursts in the 
long roll of poems that succeeded the volumes 
of 1842. But, whatever the cause, the at- 
mosphere about the matured poet did not 
furnish sufficient oxygen for the flame of his 
passion, and it flickered and burned low. 
Yet it was diverted rather than suppressed, 
and it kindled his other poetic powers. He 
275 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

became the artist passionate for perfection, 
he searched the ages for noble characters, 
and imparted some passion to them, his spir- 
ituality and his patriotism glowed brighter 
with the years, even the pessimistic utterances 
of his latter days had a certain lurid quality 
about them. So at least it seems to some of 
us, and prizing though we do what he has 
chosen to give us, we miss both in the poetry 
and in the life that lyrical expression of 
Tennyson's innermost nature which he would 
surely have given us had he been a contem- 
porary of Byron's or a countryman of Mus- 
set's. It is vain to tell us that he took the 
more dignified course, that he had a right to 
keep his deepest and most sacred emotions 
hidden from the world ; it is vain to quote to 
us from Leconte de Lisle's fine sonnet, Les 
Montreurs, which derives its interest from 
the very quality its author denounces in 
others. If Tennyson had not shown us that 
his real strength or a great part of his real 
strength lay in the lyrical expression of his 
passion, we should be content to praise him 
as we do reflective poets like Wordsworth; 
but having given us reason to believe that he 
had in him the fire that burned in Sappho 
and Catullus, in Shakspere, Byron, and Mus- 
set, he disappoints us by rarely or never 
276 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

breaking into flame, either in his verse or in 
the biography which his son has constructed 
according to his wishes. " From him that 
hath not, even that which he hath shall be 
taken away." Are we unreasonable in our 
demands upon Tennyson? Ought we to be 
contented with the noble work he has given 
us? Perhaps so; yet a few of us at least, 
after reading the memoir and going back to 
the poems, have found ourselves asking for pre- 
cisely what Taine demanded over thirty years 
ago, and what he averred he found in Alfred de 
Musset. But this leads us naturally to take 
account of our two yellow French twelvemos, 
which show up so pitifully in appearance be- 
side the royal English octavos. 

It would not be true to say that the Pari- 
sian public has been for the past eighteen 
months as busy discussing the relations of 
Musset and George Sand as the English- 
speaking public has been for a shorter period 
w^ith regard to the secluded life of the recluse 
of Farringford — for they have a multitude 
of things to talk about in Paris — but it is 
certainly true that the famous love-story has 
attracted a great deal of attention, and that 
Sandists and Mussetists have been waging a 
new Battle of the Books, or else floundering 
once more in that old Slough of Scandals 
^77 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

which Bunyan forgot to describe for us. 
M. Marieton's book, for example, might seem 
to be hurled at his Sandist adversaries from 
out the very midst of the slough, for while 
giving a history of the whole love-affair it 
devotes itself mainly to answering in the 
affirmative one question important to the 
controversy — viz., Was George Sand un- 
faithful to Musset during the latter's illness 
at Venice, or was she not? An affirmative 
answer to this unsavory question not only 
convicts George Sand of deliberate falsifica- 
tion, but also convicts her, author though 
she be, of La Mare au Diable, of being far 
looser in her actions than that Juliette of hers 
who went back to her scoundrel lover, Leone 
Leoni. M. Marieton having made an affirm- 
ative answer based on various hitherto un- 
edited documents, it is, of course, in order 
for a Sandist like M. Rocheblave to call the 
authenticity of the documents into question, 
although one could wish that he had better 
grounds for doing so than the mere fact that 
they are contradicted by certain statements 
of George Sand, a not uninterested party. 
Indeed, throughout this whole controversy a 
partisan lack of care in weighing evidence is 
as apparent as it is in literary controversies 
with which we are more familiar — for exam- 
278 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

pie, that which is continually being waged 
over the life of Shelley. 

It would not be profitable to undertake a 
minute analysis either of M. Marieton's book 
or of George Sand's passionate letters. . The 
details of the affair may be left to those who 
care to go to the sources; its outlines are 
well known and may be easily recalled. We 
all remember that by the spring of 1833 
Madame Dudevant had broken with Jules 
Sandeau, and was lying in the trough of the 
sea of romanticism waiting to be washed 
higher by its on-coming waves. With her 
inherited passions, with her artistic instincts, 
with her banal experience of married life, and 
with her stimulating contact with literary 
success and the romantic fervor of the times, 
she had no chance to escape a psychological 
crisis of the most acute kind. A similar fate 
was impending over Alfred de Musset. The 
normal debauchery of an idle, aristocratic 
youth about town, the easy success obtained 
with the Cenacle by his Andalusian verses, 
could not satisfy the most passionate heart 
in Europe now that Byron was dead. He, 
too, must have his psychological crisis, and it 
would be more acute than George Sand's. 
Whether Ste. Beuve perceived all this when 
he played the part of uncle to the modern 
279 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

Cressida, and tried to bring the romantic pair 
together is not clear ; but it is at least certain 
that from the time they first met, in June, 
1833, the more inflammable heart was set 
aglow, and that the more indurated one 
speedily responded. Then, while Tennyson 
was in the flush of his grief for Arthur 
Hallam, came the seclusion of the quai 
Malaquais, the honeymoon — for such the 
infatuated lovers really deemed it — at 
Fontainebleau, so well described in the 
Confession and in EUe et Lui, then the 
fateful journey to Italy. 

The land of lovers had known few more 
passionately sincere for the time being than 
these two, and it had known few fates more 
really tragic than that which awaited them. 
For their passions, raging outside the bounds 
of law, moral as well as physical, had to rise 
to the height like waves and then break. 
Musset's broke first. His nerves were 
strained from his recent life of dissipation, 
and his colossal ainour-propre revolted from 
the self-centred independence of a companion 
who could write for hours without taking 
note of his presence. He ruptured the alli- 
ance by harsh words, and probably by acts 
which he lived to regret and despise. Then 
came the illness at Venice, the appearance of 
280 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

Dr. Pietro Pagello upon the scene, the faith- 
lessness of George Sand, the fantastic attempt 
of Musset to reconcile himself to a mmage a 
troisy and finally his departure for Paris a 
worn-out wreck of body, mind, and soul. 
Nemesis had attached herself to him, seem- 
ing to forget George Sand left behind in un- 
romantic relations with Pagello. But Nemesis 
was not really forgetful. She presided over 
the letters, passionate on both sides, though 
with that curious maternal note on the 
woman's part that one finds never leaving 
her, which were sent over the Alps; she 
presided over the undignified return journey 
made by George Sand with Pagello in leash ; 
she presided over the renewals of intimacy, 
the swift partings, the letters, the private 
journals, the tears and wailings of the re- 
mainder of that eventful year, 1834; and 
finally she has presided ever since over the 
literary exploitation of the whole frantic epi- 
sode, over the quarrels raised by the publi- 
cation of EUe et Lui and Lui et Elle, 
and the contentions of the Sandists and 
Mussetists of the present day. 

I have no desire to incur her displeasure 

by going too deeply into these unpleasant 

matters myself, but there are at least two 

points, one specific and one general, that 

281 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

ought to be touched on. The first is how far 
M. Marieton's anti-Sand position is tenable. 
He has pubHshed a journal of Dr. Pagello 
himself, an incriminating romantic fragment 
by George Sand, entitled En Moree, by 
means of which, it is claimed, she made her 
love known to the physician, and a number 
of interesting and valuable letters of Musset 
chosen from the correspondence still some- 
what jealously guarded by the poet's sister. 
In addition he gives two drafts in Paul de 
Musset's handwriting of the alleged account 
dictated by Alfred of the now famous *' vision " 
of the sick-room at Venice and its conse- 
quences, which readers of Lui et Elle have 
not forgotten. Judged impartially, these docu- 
ments, if genuine, are the most damaging 
testimony yet brought against George Sand's 
character. As has been intimated, doubt is 
thrown upon their authenticity by her friends, 
but although M. Marieton has not given us 
all the information that could be desired 
about them, it is hard to see how the journal 
of Pagello (who was living at a great old age 
when Marieton wrote but has since died) can 
be thrown out of court, and if that stays, 
the fragment En Moree, George Sand's gage 
d'amouVy stays also. Indeed, there are a pri- 
ori reasons why it should stay, for Pagello 
282 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

could read French fluently, but spoke it 
poorly, while George Sand was just picking 
up Italian. A few romantic pages in her 
facile style would, therefore, be the most 
natural and effectual means she could choose 
for a confession of so delicate a nature. 

As for M. Marieton's reliance upon the 
truth of Paul de Musset's sick-room scene, 
it is only in keeping with his confidence in 
the latter's entire defence of his brother. 
M. Marieton, relying, it would seem, upon 
Madame Lardin de Musset, and ignoring the 
general verdict with regard to Paul's charac- 
ter, declares that the latter's novel sweats 
truth {sue la vej'ite) where we should prefer 
to say that it perspires dulness. In this 
frank credence in Paul de Musset he is cer- 
tainly bold, but if the dictated memoranda 
can be shown by examination of watermarks, 
etc., to bear the date assigned them, Decem- 
ber, 1852, nearly four years and a half before 
Alfred de Musset's death, they are certainly 
documents that cannot be lightly treated. 
They are supported, too, by a small piece of 
corroborative evidence that has not, perhaps, 
been sufficiently noticed. Alfred de Musset's 
Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle, in which 
he chivalrously takes all the blame on him- 
self and absolves George Simd, is frequently 

283 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

quoted as an authority for the fidelity of its 
description of the Fontainebleau expedition 
— for example, by Madame Arvede Barine in 
her interesting sketch of Musset — but is not 
generally reHed on as an authority for Paul 
de Musset's version of the sick-room incident. 
Yet the single tea-cup drunk out of by the 
two lovers (George Sand and Pagello), which 
figures in Lui et Elle, figures also in the 
Confession. Was it one of the touches 
that made George Sand weep when she read 
Alfred's novel? And what have the Sandists 
done with this incriminating tea-cup? The 
answer comes naturally enough — they have 
swallowed it; or else, speaking seriously, we 
may suppose that they infer that Paul de 
Musset borrowed the tea-cup scene from 
Alfred, and then embellished it in his own 
peculiarly exasperating manner. 

The second point that must be touched on 
is the question what possible value can at- 
tach to books treating of such an unpleasant 
episode. Nearly all the reviewers have ex- 
patiated on the delight they experienced 
when they found the Tennyson volumes free 
from scandal, so that one is left to infer that 
unless they were indulging in cant, British 
and American critics are above all vulgar 
curiosity, and wo"uld prefer to draw a veil 
284 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

over the inner history of Hterary men, except 
when, as in Tennyson's case, there is practi- 
cally nothing to hide. It is needless to say 
that such is not the French view, and that 
no one who has studied his Ste. Beuve will 
continue to throw his influence on the side of 
British cant. We shall do well to wish that 
our literary heroes and heroines would lead 
clean lives, but if they will not, and we pro- 
pose to be their critics, we must follow them 
at least to the banks of the Slough of Scan- 
dals. From this point of view, then, the 
books we are considering should have been 
published, and should be read by all serious 
students of George Sand and of Alfred de 
Musset. That they will be read by many 
who are not serious students is, of course, 
matter for regret ; but so is religious hypoc- 
risy, and surely no one would suggest that 
we should do away with all religions in 
order to put an end to the propagation of 
Tartuffes. 

But the documents contained in these 
books have claims to be regarded as some- 
thing far higher than mere evidence in a 
famous case of scandal. The letters that 
passed between the two lovers arc among the 
most intense ever written, and are not merely 
precious sources of information for all 

285 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

students of Romanticism, but also lyrical out- 
bursts of two passionate hearts that must be 
ranked in the future but little below the in- 
comparable Nuits of the more poetical and 
sorely strained of the two protagonists of 
this drama of suffering. Here, indeed, we 
find the best excuse for the publication of all 
the volumes and essays that have dealt with 
this remarkable episode. Out of them some 
anthologist, perhaps, still unborn, will be able 
to cull a volume of letters, poems, pages of 
description and extracts from private journals 
that will be a source of delight to all who 
care for the Hterature of passion, and will 
serve to make the memory of Musset and 
George Sand, as the former predicted, as 
abiding as that of Abelard and Heloi'se. With 
the lapse of years the grosser features of the 
story will be more or less eliminated, and the 
flame of passion, which in Musset's case at 
least was never really extinguished, will burn 
clearly for all time. It is, of course, impossible 
to prove such statements as these, for the 
charge of romantic extravagance and insin- 
cerity may be brought against the lovers, and 
such a charge can never be thoroughly 
refuted. Documents relative to any great 
passion will always be judged favorably or 
unfavorably, according to the capacity of 
286 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

the critic or reader to understand or experi- 
ence passion. Shakspere's Sonnets have 
caused some people to wonder why he 
wrote them, and have been held by other 
people not to refer to any specific passions at 
all. Still one may at least cite a few burning 
passages from these letters that will help to 
indicate the perfervid character of the whole 
correspondence. 

Here is how Musset, on April 30th, 1834, 
could write to the woman who had abandoned 
him: 

" O men enfant cherie, lorsque tu m-ainiais, m'as- 
tu jamais trompe ? Quel reproche ai-je jamais eu 
a te faire pendant sept mois que je t'ai vue, jour par 
jour? Et quel est done le lache miserable qui 
appelle perfide la femme qui I'estime assez pour 
I'avertir que son heure est venue ? Le mensonge, 
voil^ ce que j'abhorre, ce qui me rend le plus 
defiant des hommes, peut-etre le plus malheu- 
reux. Mais tu es aussi sincere que tu es noble et 
orgueilleuse." 

Again he writes later in the year, after 
relations have been renewed, only to bring 
anguish to both, and when he feels that they 
must have one final interview and part : 

'* Que ce ne soit pas I'adieu de monsieur Un tel et 
de madame Une telle. Que ce soient deux ames 

287 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

qui ont souffert, deux intelligences souffrantes, deux 
aigles blesses qui se rencontrent dans le ciel, et qui 
echangent un cri de douleur avant de se s^parer 
pour I'eternite." 

Was not the man who could write thus 
justified in writing later : 

" La posterite r^petera nos noms comme ceux de 
ces amants immortels qui n'en ont plus qu'un a eux 
deux, comme Romeo et Juliette, comme Heloise et 
Abelard." 

One citation from George Sand's equally 
moving letters must suffice. Let us take it 
from the highly wrought epistle of June 15th, 
1834: 

*^ Vois combien tu te trompais quand tu te croyais 
use par les plaisirs et abruti par 1' experience ! Vois 
que ton corps s'est renouvele et que ton ame sort de 
sa chrysalide. Si, dans son engourdissement, elle 
a produit de si beaux poemes, quels sentiments, 
quelles idees en sortiront maintenant qu'elle a 
deploye ses ailes. Aime et ecris, c'est ta vocation, 
mon ami. Monte vers Dieu sur les rayons de ton 
genie et envoie ta muse sur la terre raconter aux 
hommes les mysteres de I'amour et de la foi." 

Alfred de Musset took his '* brother 
George " at her word, and the next two years 
were the most fruitful of his life. But how 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

does the work produced under such circum- 
stances, together with that of his youth and 
of his sterile later years, compare with that 
of his more fortunate British contemporary — 
for to compare the lives of the two men further 
is surely unnecessary? Putting to one side 
the delightful comedies and contes, have we 
any right to share Taine's preference for 
Musset's poetry as compared with that of 
Tennyson? Obviously not, if Tennyson's 
admirers, like Mr. Aldrich and Dr. Van Dyke, 
are justified in maintaining that their favorite 
must rank next to Shakspere and Milton in 
the hierarchy of the English poets. If the 
Idylls of the King be a sustained and noble 
epic rather than the " boudoir epic " Mr. 
Frederic Harrison finds them to be ; if In 
Memoriam be really the most profound poem 
of the century rather than an unequal series of 
elegiac verses appealing to an over-emotional 
and not very thoughtful public ; if Maud fails 
in any way to suggest a sensational novel, and 
The Princess is a work of perfect, not hybrid 
art, then these poems, together with the 
ballads, the idylls of English Hfe, the mono- 
logues, and the wonderful songs, are clearly 
enough to set Tennyson far above the 
author of the Nuits, the Letter to Lamartine, 
and the Stanzas to Malibran. If, however, 
19 289 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

Tennyson's longer poems are to be forgotten 
save for selected passages, and if his reputa- 
tion is to rest on the shorter poems in his early 
manner and on the tradition of his artistic 
command of rhythm and diction ; if, further- 
more, the world that is now sated with com- 
posite art renews its youth through some 
stirring crisis, and once more demands passion 
as a primary element of literature, will the 
bard of Aldworth and Farringford hold his 
own against the poet of the streets of Paris? 
Perhaps he may, in spite of all that may be 
said about the suppression of his passion and 
about the deficiencies of his longer poems. 
Should the world come once more to demand 
passion, it will probably be Byron that will 
ecHpse Tennyson, not Alfred de Musset, 
whose star will nevertheless rise splendidly in 
the poetic heavens. For, after all, Musset's 
strictly poetical work, great as it is at its best, 
is not, it would seem, sufficient in amount to 
balance that of Tennyson, even if the latter 
poet is shorn of half his present glory by 
envious time. But leaving the question of the 
relative position of the two poets aside, it is 
certainly permissible for those who care for 
the lyrical expression of intense passion to 
maintain that they find little or nothing in 
Tennyson that takes the place for them of 
290 



TENNYSON AND MUSSET 

Musset's chief poems. If they are pressed to 
point out a passage illustrating the kind of 
passion they demand from Tennyson, but do 
not find, they may quote these lines from the 
Nuit de Mai : 

" J'ai vu le temps ou ma jeunesse 
Sur mes levres ^tait sans cesse 
Prete h chanter comme un oiseau ; 
Mais j'ai souffert un dur martyre, 
Et le moins que j'en pourrais dire, 
Si je I'essayais sur ma lyre, 
La briserait comme tin roseau.'''' 

" Here," they may say, *' is the ' lyric cry ' 
which we have missed more or less in British 
poetry since the days of Byron," and if they 
are pressed to describe still further the voice 
that has moved them so profoundly, they may 
reply, quoting the Stanzas to Malibran : 

" C'est cette voix du coeur qui seule au coeur arrive, 
Que nul autre, apr^s toi, ne nous rendra jamais." 



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